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Our Man in Downtown Oaxaca: The Zocalo
I’m back from Oaxaca, Mexico, home of 16th-century colonial architecture, seven types of mole sauce, fried grasshoppers and the Western Hemisphere’s worst bus station restroom.
Oaxaca, a town of about 300,000 in the southern Mexican highlands, is one of my favorite places in the world, and I’m lucky to have Waco friends who summer there and are willing to put me up. I just spent an extended week there with my wife — my third trip, her first. We ate at gourmet restaurants and at stands in the bustling markets. We hit modernist art galleries in the city and headed to the Sierra Norte de Oaxaca to hike in cloud forests. (To get there requires catching a ride from the second-class bus station, home of the infamous restroom; I will spare you a description).
I go to Mexico about every other year, and I always come back with the same conclusion: Mexicans have us beat on urban living, hands down.
Just about every Mexican city I’ve been to has a “zocalo,” or pedestrian plaza, usually surrounded by shops, cafes, churches and government buildings. Some details of the scene seem almost scripted: cafe tables where you can order a coffee or a michelada, vendors selling balloons and roasted corn, couples smooching on the benches, marimba players, shoeshine men, bandstands.
It’s the city’s living room. In downtown Oaxaca, on any given weeknight, you’ll find a festival-sized crowd — hundreds, maybe more than a thousand, just hanging out, eating ice cream, pushing baby strollers, listening to street music.
The zocalo is anchored on one side by a 300-year-old cathedral made of sage-green stone. On the other is a city block of markets stuffed with rich foods, handmade garments and leather bags, and yes, barrels of salty, crunchy grasshoppers. (Land shrimp I call them, and they’re not bad).
A cobblestone pedestrian mall leads away from the zocalo, and tends to attract a lot of tourists, mostly European and Mexican, it appears. The mall and the adjoining streets are fronted by heavy masonry buildings with massive wooden doors that open to reveal little worlds. Inside each building is a courtyard, often landscaped with bouganvilla and avocado trees, and surrounded by artisan shops, cafes or travel agencies.
It’s an appealing reversal of the pattern in the U.S., where we plop buildings onto the middle of a lot. In Oaxaca, the building wraps around the space, creating a sense of shelter and intimacy.
Like most places worth visiting, this is a place where people get around on foot or public transportation. Wait two minutes at any busy street and you’ll soon have a choice of cabs or buses.
My friend lives in a newer neighborhood a bit away from the center, but even there houses and businesses are squeezed together close enough that you’re never more than a minute away from your corner fruit stand or tortilleria. The streetlights were out one night when I was walking to the store, and the sidewalks were uneven, but the taco stands lighted the way and make me feel safe.
In the same neighborhood we had breakfast with my friend’s mother, an indigenous woman who can still speak her native Zapotec language. Somehow we got to talking about sidewalks.
We don’t even have sidewalks in a lot of neighborhoods, I told her, and in other places they’re impassable.
She found this situation hard to believe. She offered me advice: if the city won’t provide you with sidewalks you should make a formal complaint to your governor.
I explained to her that people in my country seem not to care; they’re fine with driving 15 minutes to the grocery store or even driving to their neighbors’ house. She must think Americans are very strange.
I’ve seen too much of Oaxaca to idealize it as a model city. In the shadow of the beautiful center are the poverty and squalor you find in other parts of Mexico. Oaxaca’s international popularity has inflated its land prices beyond what most natives can afford, and now settlers are now snatching up lots willy-nilly in the farming valleys half an hour out of town — creating the slum sprawl of the future.
Still, old cities like this are worth studying as our own community tries to rebuild its downtown and its zocalo, Heritage Square. If our community leaders decide to go on a fact-finding tour as they have done recently with Chattanooga, Tenn., and Branson, Mo., I’ll volunteer my guide services and hard-earned wisdom. Not least of which is this rule: Use the bathroom before you head to the bus station.
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There’s a river down there?
After literally turning its back to its river for too long, Waco is starting to turn back to it. As I noted in a story Friday, Lake Brazos is even starting to be used for triathlons and other water recreation.
Still, only a handful of buildings actually take advantage of the view: The Baylor Law School, Lake Brazos Steakhouse and the new Buzzard Billy’s come to mind.
Here’s a head-scratching example of a riverside building that completely disregards the river.
A.J. Moore Academy was built as Jefferson-Moore High School in the early 1970s, at the corner of University-Parks and Jefferson Avenue. It’s next door to my house, so I see it a lot:
A downtown riverside campus: What a great idea, and how poorly executed. U-Parks separates the school from the steep riverbank covered with brush and arundo cane, so there’s no hope of access. The school itself is up on a terrace, the other side of a large, unlandscaped parking lot. There’s a handful of little slivers that qualify as windows in Nixon-era architecture. There’s also a big glassed-in atrium-looking entrance, but it’s designed in such a way that nobody really has a view from the upper part of it.
Bottom line: If you didn’t know there was a river next door, you wouldn’t know there was a river next door.,
I was hoping the new $5 million renovation would correct this poor design and open up the campus to the river. As far as I can tell it won’t. They’re building some science labs on the back side of the school and with the help of a $550,000 TIF grant, resurfacing a parking lot in front and adding some much-needed landscaping. Still, I don’t think it will take advantage of its prime riverside real estate. In fact, it’s more of a barrier to the river than anything. The campus takes up several blocks, and with the new addition, apparently you won’t be able to cut through campus to get to the river. (OK, this is a bit of a personal grievance: The campus stands between my apartment and the river trail where I like to run).
As usual, the well-intentioned improvements of one generation become the headache of the next. I’m not sure what can be done to make A.J. Moore fit better into our growing downtown, but I welcome your thoughts.
That’s it for now: I’m going on vacation for a week or so. Behave yourselves while I’m gone.
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In defense of haberdashery
I’m learning that a blog is like a trotline. If left unattended too long, the little fish become bait for the bigger ones. Then maybe some snapping turtles come by and make a gory mess of everything.
My entry about the last days of the Waco Trib pressroom somehow became a forum on your humble, fedora-topped correspondent, who in some considered opinions looked like too much like Dick Tracy or a douchebag, and whose blog was deemed “super-boring.”
Well, I thought, I’ve been found out. I am pretty boring. Especially in contrast to some of the people I’ve interviewed in the last week — a guy who canoed from Maine to Marble Falls, Texas, and a Marine veteran who fell into a punjee trap in Vietnam. Whereas, I write about the sad state of Waco sidewalks.
Hence, the hat. To compensate for my lack of sizzle, my girlfriend of a couple of years ago bought the fur felt fedora you see in the picture. Afterwards, she found me interesting enough to marry.
Not everyone is born with a scintillating personality, but most people can afford an interesting topper. In fact, with the right hat one may dispense altogether with a personality.
Try wearing a hat to the next party you attend. While others try to impress each other with their knowledge of alligator wrestling or the latest unrest in Morocco, or their stories of Jet Skiing down the Amazon, just stand around and listen and smile knowingly. People will remember you.
“Oh, the guy with the bowler derby,” they’ll say later. “What a fascinating character.” Or: “Oh, you were the dude with the fez at the party. You know, I’ve always wanted to go to Morocco. Are you concerned about the unrest there?”
Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t, but they hang on every word. The headgear is the message.
What a shame, though, that you can’t wear a hat nowadays without drawing undue attention. Once hats weren’t a costume but an integral part of the man and a signifier of his role in society. For my granddad, it was a Resistol for the ranch, a Tom Landry fedora for the bank.
I think hats began fading about the time of Kennedy, presaging an age of male hairstyles and narcissism. Our well-coiffed president couldn’t be seen with hat hair while staring down Khrushchev. LBJ was the last president I know of with a decent regard for hats, and what a hat: The Stetson Open Road, a short-brimmed cowboy hat that exuded Texas cool.
It seems hats may be making a comeback, thanks to the hiphop culture (and no doubt my blog, which is about as hip-hop as you can get). I think it’s high time President Obama showed some leadership on this vital subject. What should it be? A homburg, a Panama, maybe a tophat, like FDR? (Photoshopped entries welcome.)
For those fashion pioneers daring enough to sport a vintage hat, I recommend the Style Station on I-35 near Ross.
I’ll take your comments in stride regarding my goofy picture and my sometimes goofy blog, and I may even update my picture someday. But please, don’t be a hat-hater. Peace out.
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Losing the press room
It’s the Friday night of an Independence Day weekend and I’m working the cops beat. It’s hot out there still after a 100-degree day, and the crooks have been busy, robbing a check-cashing store owner and an ice cream man.
It’s cool and quiet here in our cavernous newsroom, where I am part of a holiday skeleton crew. But I’m thinking about the ink-stained crew that will be running at full tilt about the time I’m going to bed in a couple of hours. The pressroom will be rolling out hundreds of pages a minute on an enormous three-story machine, producing 35,000 copies of tomorrow’s newspaper — 35,000 precision-crafted, highly perishable products.
The pressroom guys will be history after July 13, when we start having our paper printed in Austin. I will miss them, though I don’t know many of their names. In the 12 years I’ve worked here, I’ve gone to bed every night knowing they’d get the paper out, as sure as my own lungs would continue to pump and my heart would beat. Through power outages and equipment failures and contested presidential elections, they’d get the job done.
Necessary as it may be in these economic times, losing the pressroom feels like an amputation. For more than a century, it’s been the brawny physical side of this newspaper: They turned mere “content,” that is, information, into a physical thing you could clip and roll up and spill coffee on. By the same token, I can tell people I don’t just work at an office: The Trib is also a factory, full of craftsmen who have passed down their trade over generations. What they do looks like magic to me when the spindles are rolling and the papers are flying off the press.
No matter what our digital future may look like, the printing trade will survive in some form. Even horseshoe-making survived the automobile. But losses like this are painful, not only for those who have to find new careers but for the rest of us who have taken pride in our made-in-Waco newspaper.
Working at a newspaper these days is all about keeping hope alive, hope that the public’s desire to be enlightened about their will continue to support those of us who want to write, report and assemble news. That’s what I keep telling myself as I cross off the vacant cubicles on the seating chart like a tic-tac-toe board, and as I imagine half this huge building sitting empty.
Perhaps this crisis in the newspaper industry is only the birth pang of journalism’s nimble and more responsive future. But I’m proud to have been part of journalism’s grubby, ink-stained past. So long, guys.
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Hitchcock (and others) at the Hippodrome
Along with swimming holes, mint juleps and fresh salsa, watching old movies in old movie palaces is one of the primal joys of summer. In my college days I used to catch the likes of Lawrence of Arabia and Casablanca at the Paramount Theater in Austin. Now the Waco Hippodrome is stepping up to the plate with an ice-cold lineup for the summer.
“E.T.”, that icon of the early 1980s, plays tonight at 7:30 p.m; tickets are $5 for adults, $3 for children. Other family movies will follow — “Kung Fu Panda” on June 19 and the “Muppet Movie” on June 26. Nothing wrong with family movies — I was the target audience for “E.T.” and the “Muppet Movie” when they came out. But I’m more excited about the Hippodrome’s creepy Hitchcock lineup.
“Rear Window,” showing at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, kicks off the monthly series from the master of suspense, part of the Third Thursday festivities organized by the Downtown Merchants Association. “To Catch a Thief” is coming in July, followed by my favorite, “Vertigo,” in August.
You can get free tickets for the Hitchcock movies by dining or shopping downtown and saving your receipt. See you there.
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Washington Ave. bridge gets its close-up
In any other Texas town of Waco’s size, the Washington Avenue bridge would be considered postcard-worthy. It’s 108 years old, 450 long and it has the unwieldy distinction of being “the longest and oldest single-span truss bridge still open to traffic in the United States.”
It’s a thing of rugged beauty, but eclipsed by the older and more distinctive Waco Suspension Bridge just a stone’s throw away. So it’s good to see the old iron workhorse getting a $4.8 million makeover with state funds. The crews are stripping it down for repainting, and replacing some joints to ensure it lasts well beyond my lifetime. The bridge will be painted black, its original color, and it will become once again a two-lane bridge.
Even under surgery, it’s eyecatching. The construction contractor has wrapped in a billowy tent as if by the artist Christo. I walked down a couple of times this week with my camera to capture the play of light and shadow on the sheathing. Here are some morning shots:
I shot the following photos Monday evening mostly from the east side of the river. It was a perfect spring day, and the river trail leading to Bledsoe-Miller Park was bustling. It looked like a scene from an artist’s rendering: Families feeding ducks, old and young men fishing with cane poles, and in the distance, lovers leaning over the rail at the Suspension Bridge.
Bethany and I walked over and checked out the cypress tree we planted there as part of our wedding, nearly six months ago. It’s looking fine, sprouting out bright green bristles. It’s part of a line of cypress trees, and hopefully will provide a nice backdrop to future postcards of the restored Washington Avenue bridge.
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Your SWAG or mine?
A real estate broker introduced me some years ago to the concept of the SWAG: A scientific wild@$$ guess. By which he meant, Here’s a plausible prediction, just don’t hold me to it.
When it comes to predicting population growth, we’re all swaggers. Is Waco the next Texas boomtown, or is it likely to plod along for the next few decades? Your swag is as good as mine.
A highly respected planning firm hired for Waco’s 1967 Comprehensive Plan predicted that McLennan County’s population would grow to 215,000 by 1985, with 75 percent living in the city of Waco. We didn’t pass that population threshold until the 21st century, and today nearly half the population of 230,000 lives outside the city. (You can read all about Waco’s plans of yesteryear here).
This week the city council hired a Portland consultant to work with the community to design a “Greater Downtown Waco” that would accommodate 80,000 more people.
According to Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce folks who have done the preliminary work on this, there’s enough vacant land in seven square miles of central city to accommodate that many people, plus 65,000 jobs, at about the density of New Orleans’ French Quarter.
The chamber has set a goal that Greater Downtown should capture half the 160,000 people it projects will be added to McLennan County’s population by 2050.
One online commenter on my story accused the chamber of swagging, saying that such optimistic projections make him inclined to dismiss the whole planning effort as a pipe dream.
To be fair, the chamber folks didn’t pull the number out of thin air. They chose the most aggressive scenario projected by the Texas State Data Center (http://txsdc.utsa.edu) for 2040 and extrapolated out to 2050. The scenario assumes that McLennan County’s growth continues at the pace it did in the 1990s, a pace the state demographer calls unlikely. The “preferred scenario” has Waco adding a mere 54,000 by 2040.
So what’s realistic? Beats the heck out of me. Population projections use complicated algorithms based on a simple fallacy: that historic trends will continue indefinitely.
Assuming that “trends continue,” the third-grader you know will be 10 feet tall in a few years, and every bank in the United States will soon be out of business.
What history does tell us is that long-term growth is unpredictable. Cities can limp along for decades, then explode almost overnight. That growth sometimes continues for decades before hitting a plateau or declining (think Detroit or Buffalo.)
By historical standards, it wouldn’t be surprising for a city of Waco’s size to grow by 70 percent over 40 years.
Fort Worth in 1940 had 177,662 people, comparable to Greater Waco’s population today. In 20 years, Fort Worth’s population doubled, and strong growth has continued. Likewise, Austin was 300,000 residents in 1960; its population doubled in 20 years.
A century ago, cities like Pittsburgh and St. Louis were booming, but in the last 40 years most of the growth has been in “Edge Cities,” i.e. incorporated areas in the orbit of an existing metropolis. For example, Arlington, Texas, is now bigger than St. Louis; Tempe, Ariz., is bigger than Pittsburgh.
But who’s to say that trend will continue? Technology (mainly the automobile and telecommunications) and cheap suburban real estate allowed Edge Cities to flourish. Who’s to say 21st century technologies (high-speed rail, telecommuting, etc) and new attitudes toward cities won’t change the game again?
By the same token Waco’s growth could stagnate in the next 40 years and Texas could become a new Rust Belt, confounding everyone’s official predictions.
But given the bones of our local economy — good transportation routes to Texas’ big cities, a varied manufacturing base, plentiful water supply and a full range of higher education institutions — my SWAG is that Waco’s best years are ahead of it.
I’d like to hear some SWAGs from others: How much growth will Waco see? And how much growth is desirable?
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Decision time for Cameron Park
Talk about a sense of civic ownership. I could hardly find a seat last night at the Waco Regional Tennis Center, so packed was the room with Cameron Park devotees. A hundred or so had turned out to learn about and discuss the “final plans” for the $6.9 million bond-funded renovation.
I’ll be writing about this later this week (we’ve been a bit short on space in the paper this week), but I was impressed with the passion people had for “their” park, whether they were mountain-bikers, walkers, dog lovers, birdwatchers, disc golfers or Cameron Park neighborhood residents.
The crowd was supportive of the planned improvements, but they wanted to get specific: Concrete or crushed granite on the trails? How many parking spaces were really necessary, and where was the water going to drain? How could safety be improved? Could the city add 9-1-1 callboxes along the trails?
The parks staff said they would explore those issues and appeared to be setting up time to meet with some of the citizens. And they said they would try to increase public involvement in the planning process, which was the main concern I heard.
It was a diverse crowd, ethnically and age-wise, but it struck me that the process has really galvanized the under-40 crowd, which is often characterized as civically apathetic.
Jon Pursley, one of the mountainbikers who has been seeking to “tweak” the plan, said Cameron Park was what brought and kept him here. He and other members of the Waco Bicycle Club have helped develop the 15-mile trail system in the rustic area of the park.
I can also say Cameron Park was the selling point for me moving here 11 years ago. Living in Georgetown, I had been accepted for a job at the Trib, but I wasn’t sure about Waco as a home. What I had seen downtown looked mostly seedy, and the Interstate area looked dismal. But when an editor drove me through Cameron Park on a clear autumn day, with the red oaks in full Technicolor and the vines shrouding the road, I was sold.
So many times since then, I have retreated to the limestone cliffs and shady hollows of Cameron Park to clear my mind and get away from the noise of life. I have skinned knees, bent mountainbike wheels and even been sucker-punched once by a stranger (long story I’ll tell another time). But I can’t imagine living in Waco without its green soul.
It didn’t take me long to learn about Cameron Park’s dangerous reputation. Though crime statistics show that reputation is largely undeserved, even some of the park’s champions Monday night complained of seedy activity in the park — sexual activity on the trail, shady characters hanging around in parked cars, vandalism of buildings, etc.
The reality is that a park of Cameron’s size in a city of Waco’s size will always be a challenge to police. By their nature, the secluded areas that attract tranquility-seekers like me also provide a haven for those with something to hide, such as drug-dealers, prostitutes, vandals and thieves. And it would take the equivalent of a small-town police force to effectively patrol two miles of rustic park 24 hours a day.
Some of the park lovers have suggested closing off parts of the park at night. One idea from the audience was a “citizens on patrol” program for the park — just give bikers and hikers a t-shirt, cellphone and a bit of training and encourage them to call in questionable activity. That’s an idea I’ve had before, and I’d be willing to serve my round.
Here’s another related idea: Cameron Park After Dark, with bonfires, organized campouts, concerts, moonlight hiking tours, anything to get regular folks out having a good time on selected evenings. Outnumber the shady people, and they’ll make themselves scarce.
I’d be interested to hear your ideas. How can we make the new, improved Cameron Park feel like a safer place?
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Revolution (and pollen) in the air
This is not a political blog. So may I say, concerning Wednesday’s Tea Party tax protest, what a fine tradition peaceful political protest is in America and what a fine free-speech venue Heritage Square has shaped up to be.
I should leave it at that, perhaps adding that it was a glorious spring day straight out of a Claritin commercial, full of dappled light, cool breezes and clouds of oak pollen. The crowd of a few hundred, carrying various flags of classic American belligerence (Don’t Tread on Me, Come and Take It), seemed peaceable enough as they cheered antigovernment rhetoric.
The brand new Square Bar and Kitchen beckoned the angry/hungry/thirsty with a sign proclaiming its support of the party and a special: Free iced tea with lunch! A local radio squawk jock, squawking more than usual on a tin-can-sized bullhorn, thanked the crowd and urged it to support his station and advertisers. Politicians stumped, though they seemed put off balance by the lack of a real microphone.
One man handed me a documentary Obama DVD by the conspiracy guru Alex Jones, so I’ll soon know the shocking truth about our commander-in-chief. (Hitler youth? Space alien?)
As for signs, pigs were in, as in pork. So was a pun on the word “change,” as in spare change we’ll have after Obama taxes the bejesus out of us. Tyranny, socialism and puns on “Obama” were mainstays. Exclamation points were in.
The ribbon for most creative went to a woman who took photos of Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and President Obama, dressed them up as cute little buccaneers. “The Real Pirates,” her placard read.
But wait. Aren’t the Somali pirates, who even as I type are assaulting real American sailors off the Horn of Africa, real enough? I bet the pirates are smarting at the suggestion that democratically elected American politicians outdid them on pirate cred. Arrrggh!
I heard a lot of rhetoric indistinguishable from garden-variety AM talk radio. Serious discussions of public policy? Not so much.
I wanted to ask: “What is the threshold between normal taxation for the common good and ‘socialism’ and how do we know we’ve crossed it? Does socialism mean raising taxes on the top tax bracket to 40 percent (it was in the 70s throughout Reagan’s first term)? And how many of these protesters earn more than $250,000 a year, anyway?”
But I knew better. We reporters are expected to be political celibates (some would prefer eunuchs.) So again, nice party, guys. Viva la democracia!
I left after it became clear that there would be no final catharsis, no storming of the Bastille, no dumping of Bigelow Earl Grey into the Brazos. Besides, I really needed to take a Claritin.
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Zombie madness downtown!
A late Waco mayor is remembered for saying that downtown Waco was “brain-dead” and was never coming back. Not so well remembered was that the phrase was something like “practically brain-dead,” and that he later recanted, after seeing the progress at RiverSquare.
Still, it’s possible Mr. McGlasson knew more than anyone imagined.
On Wednesday a horde of zombies descended on downtown, with grotesque faces, dead eyes and bone-chilling cries for brains. They burst into the Olive Branch cafe as horrified patrons looked on. Then they ordered soups and salads.
As you may have read in Wendy’s blog, the zombie parade was part of the first-ever Waco flash mob, fittingly scheduled for high noon April 1. Most of the dozen or so participants were summoned by electronic means (Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, blogs, etc). But two of our liveliest undead were my neighbors, summoned by a knock at the door: Stephen and Ashley, their toddler, Olive; and Paul.
True, it would have been slightly more menacing if we had been a mob of at least 30 or 40 fully costumed zombies, as the shadowy organizers of this event hoped. It would have helped if some of us weren’t laughing as we staggered past confused shopkeepers, diners and social services clients. (One street character at Sixth and Austin muttered at us earnestly, as if this was a normal but vexing occurrence in his world).
It might have been more convincing if my fedora (with “Press” card) and Ace bandage had not blown off and into the street, stopping traffic and forcing me to break character.
And maybe we should have thought about the awkwardness of actually waiting in a long line at a popular new cafe with red dye/Karo syrup blood dripping down our faces and clothes.
Still, a threshold has been crossed, a gauntlet has been thrown down. After all, if zombies can wander the streets undisturbed and sit down for a civilized lunch, Waco must be tolerant enough to accept all kinds of folks, right?
Anyway, I’m up for the next flash mob, if someone else would like to organize it. Just let me know when and where.
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Let’s stir things up
Is your downtown lacking in vim, vigor and vitality? Two words for you, young man: Flash mob.
No, this isn’t about organized crime or streaking. In case the authorities are reading this, let me emphasize that I’m not advocating those.
A flash mob is a 21st-century phenomenon in which a crowd is assembled by electronic media for a seemingly spontaneous demonstration, meant to amuse and confuse the public.
Like a giant pillow fight in public. Or a subway car packed with identical twins seated across from each other like a mirror. Or a crowd of people dressed in blue polo shirts entering a Best Buy, to the bemusement of Best Buy employees dressed … in blue polo shirts. You can see some brilliant examples here.
By my calculation, Waco is about six years behind on this trend, but here’s your chance to catch up.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to send an email indicating your interest to wacomob@gmail.com. You will be provided with a time, place and instructions. I’m told this event will occur somewhere downtown, but organizers are tight-lipped on details.
All ages are welcome. I’m told it will be legal, apolitical and harmless, though it may permanently blow some minds. The purpose is fun, and maybe art.
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Downtown banner ideas
It’s been too long, really. Don’t worry, I wasn’t silenced by the powers that be for daring to criticize the secret cultic lamp logo. I’ve just been busy.
I got several, ahem, illuminating candidates for replacing the lamppost-on-lamppost logo for downtown. Lara led off by suggesting the flashy Art Deco “Waco” sign at the Hippodrome, which is better than any idea I had. It’s historical but flashy, iconic but not overexposed. Boffo.
I was intrigued by one defender of the current streetlight image, who said it symbolizes how downtown Waco is lighting the way into the future by, you know, putting up lamp posts. Heavy, man.
Doug suggested the bird from the west side of the courthouse. He called it a seagull; I concluded it’s a sentry goose, for reasons you will see in the comment threads. (The backstory involves dog crucifixion, be warned). I also wholeheartedly agree with Doug’s hatred of the molded plastic bus benches.
Continuing the avian theme, one suggested grackles. Given that grackles will probably perch on the banners, it may be as redundant as the lamppost graphic, but I like the idea.
Some suggested historical images, such as the old City Hall or 19th-century gunfights. That would be more interesting than what we have now. But really, aren’t firearms already a bit too closely associated with the name “Waco?” Besides, one of the guys who got gunned down was the editor of this newspaper, so I don’t want to plant thoughts in people’s heads.
Then there was this stylized Waco skyline, sent to me by my Trib colleague John Geary.
Well, I didn’t have any fancy design program, but I thought I’d try my hand at a banner. I sharpened my quill, put on my green eyeshade and fired up my kerosene-powered copier. Please excuse the rough-hewn results. My idea was to use a skyline (including St. Francis church and the old feed silos, if you’ll notice) and one of our beloved downtown red-tail hawks. I used a kind of early 20th-century Arts and Crafts font, suggesting the time period when a lot of our downtown was built. Herewith:
I think we could get a better hawk in there, but you get the idea. By the way, I’ve been seeing the hawks carrying materials for a nest to the fire escape of the Alico building. Maybe we’ll have some baby hawks this summer. There’s a slogan for you: “Downtown Waco: Where the chicks are.”
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The cult of the lamp post
You might say I’m easily amused, but I found myself laughing this week at those “Downtown Waco” banners that hang from lampposts around the central city. You know, the green ones, with the stylized streetlamp on them.
The gale-force winds from the big storm the other night knocked one upside down just outside our window at the Trib, and I saw them from a new, absurd perspective.
Nothing says “welcome to historic downtown Waco” better than a picture of a fake antique lamppost hanging from a fake antique lamppost.
It’s a bit like identifying yourself with a T-shirt sporting a picture of a T-shirt.
At a time when just about every town in America is prettifying its downtown with these lollipop light fixtures, it’s not a terribly memorable icon.
Another strike against this image is that it was created to be the symbol of Downtown Waco Inc. For that reason, one of the downtown boards a couple of years ago was proposing to remove the banners in the wake of the financial scandal that shut the agency down. I don’t know why, but that never happened.
Anyway, I got to thinking about what the icon of downtown Waco should be. The most obvious would be the Suspension Bridge, though it’s done to death. The Alico building? Well, I’m not sure an insurance building with a neon billboard sums up the soul of our city.
I’ll save my brilliant ideas in favor of soliciting yours. What’s an image that points to something distinctive about our downtown, and simple enough to be comprehended by a car passing at 30 mph?
Post your ideas here, or send me an image at jbsmith@wacotrib.com, and I’ll display them in a future post.
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Walling out Waco on the Riverwalk
The inner city of Waco rarely evokes Robert Frost for me, but I thought I heard the poet’s brusque Yankee brogue this week while I was jogging on the riverwalk. It was not a voice of approval.
After six years of delay, the riverwalk is at last being extended from the Texas Ranger Museum to the Ferrell Center. That’s good news for those who like to jog, bike or skate along the riverfront, and it’s encouraging to see Baylor, the state and Waco spending $2.3 million to connect the campus to the city. It will be a lighted concrete trail 4,000 feet long, with benches and impressive iron bridges.
My excitement at finding the Riverwalk extension half-open clouded over when I saw that it was flanked on the Baylor side by a high fence made of steel bars. It appears the fence will run from the museum, past the law school and practice fields, often running along a masonry terrace.
Part of the trail seems due to be fenced on both sides, like a cattle chute at a slaughterhouse. Elsewhere, the effect is of a fortress university, lacking only a moat and drawbridge to keep the hordes at bay.
“Good fences make good neighbors” is the principle that permeates our politics from Palestine to the Rio Grande. I can imagine the thinking that went into this fence, which must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. “Who knows what kind of people might be lurking on that riverwalk at night? We owe it to students and their tuition-paying parents to control who comes on campus. After all, if we could prevent just one crime……”
I can also hear the author of “Mending Wall” in rebuttal:
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down!”
Who’s walled in here? Baylor students, who might otherwise drift down to the riverside and have a picnic between classes, who might want to bike down a bit further and discover downtown and Cameron Park.
Who’s walled out? That frightening abstraction: “The public.” That’s you and me. Or those of us who find the riverwalk interesting enough, safe enough, inviting enough to venture down there for recreation. But if it’s boring and intimidating and unsafe-feeling, few people will go. Without “safety in numbers,” it becomes in fact, unsafe, a refuge for the antisocial.
Fences like this appeal to the reptilian part of our brain that seeks security above all else, even if it conflicts with the mammalian instinct that tells us we are safest among an orderly crowd, a herd, if you like. In an urban context, isolation is never the foundation of security. Instead it’s what the great urban critic Jane Jacobs calls “eyes on the street,” a multitude of witnesses. That’s why the San Antonio Riverwalk feels safer than ours.
A promenade wedged between an unscalable iron fence and a wide river doesn’t feel safe to me. If you get in trouble, you’re unlikely to be seen, and there’s nowhere to run. And then there’s the ugliness of the fence itself. It seems clear to me that there’s a great difference between enjoying a vista and enjoying a vista from behind bars. That was the idea behind the Cameron Park Zoo. But it didn’t seem so clear to everyone during the discussion of building a six-foot iron fence on top of Lovers Leap (in the end, the council chose a shorter fence). In this case, the fence spoils the Baylor Law School view of the river, and the pedestrian’s view of the Baylor Law School.
But it seems the riverwalk will be fenced off. It’s difficult to make the case that fences are the enemy of a healthy urban environment in an age of gated communities, when few of us actually have the experience of a healthy urban environment. As for me, I’ll use the riverwalk, fences and all, no doubt. But maybe in 20 years, when Waco has become a real city, a good strong wind will come and knock the old rusted green barriers down, and no one will see the need to replace them.
Something there is that does not love a fence.
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Camels and platypuses in Waco: A field guide
This week, the ever-deliberative city council pondered the renaming of Cameron Park East, and then punted the issue back to the Parks Commission for further ponderance.
The poor commission had already tried twice before with proposals. Two Rivers — referring to the Bosque and Brazos, which meet at the park — was a recurrent theme in the lists. In the second round Cliffview (sounds like a motel) was scrapped in favor of the Cliffs at Two Rivers (sounds like a pretentious golf community).
One council member thought all of these names were too “vanilla,” while two said leave “East” in the name, such as Brazos Park East, or leave the name be.
As usual, naming a public place is fraught with politics. Often what emerges is an unsatisfying compromise, like Solomon’s proposal to split a baby in half. The whole is less than the sum of its parts.
Discussing the name change before the meeting, City Manager Groth said he hoped the council could pick something short, because inevitably it will be shortened. Who says “William Cameron Park,” or “The Dr. Mae Jackson Development Center,” or on the private sector side, “Central Texas Marketplace?” And I for one refuse to utter the words “Miss Nellie’s Pretty Place,” no matter how fine a lady was Congressman Poage’s mom.
But democracy and brevity are well-known enemies. Groth alluded to the old saw that “a camel is a horse designed by a committee.”
Disregarding the implied speciesism (stranded in the desert, I know which animal I’d choose) I think a better analogy would be the platypus, with its bill, claws, fur and egg-laying ability — one of God’s awkward jokes.
I have collected some local platypus specimens, with some brief field notes as to their habitat and origins.
- Bledsoe-Miller Park and Recreation Center: Generations of Wacoans have grown up believing somebody important was named Bledsoe Miller. Apparently, this was thought to be the only opportunity to honor a famous black Waco native, so the powers that be gerrymandered the names of Pearl Harbor hero Doris Miller and Broadway baritone Jules Bledsoe. Both were great men, and it seems cheap to assign them as roommates. Bledsoe seems most appropriate, since “Old Man River” could be a theme throughout the park.
- Martin Luther King Jr. Drive/Lake Brazos Drive. Once again, the name reflects a community’s ambivalence. Councilman Lawrence Johnson struggled for years in the 1990s to get the Lake Brazos Drive renamed. The compromise: Both names are now official, and visitors are lost.
On the other hand, kudos where kudos is due: At least they didn’t apply Dr. King’s name to the most forlorn inner-city street, as other towns have done. - Jefferson-Moore High School. Thankfully, this platypus has been humanely euthanized. When the all-black A.J. Moore High School was shuttered during integration, WISD built a new downtown high school on Jefferson Avenue. Some community leaders wanted to call it “Jefferson High School,” while others wanted to preserve the old name. They put both names in a blender, out poured this smoothie of a name. In latter years, it has been renamed A.J. Moore Academy, once again honoring the respected black principal.
- Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum/Fort Fisher: The previous city manager, Kathy Rice, was confused when she moved to Waco and saw wayfaring signs for “Fort Fisher.” She had to be told that the attraction was the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum. She changed the signs to “Texas Ranger Museum,” clarifying for tourists just what it was they were on their way to.
A historical note: Fort Fisher was a short-lived Ranger camp from pre-Waco days. Its exact location is unknown, but it was appropriated by the founders of the Ranger museum in the late 1960s. At first there were two separate attractions: A museum and a hall of fame, with separate tickets required for each.
An unhistorical note: In 2009, who really cares?
Homework:
- What other platypus names exist in Greater Waco?
- What name would you prefer for Cameron Park East?
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Hedonism on the cheap
For months I have avoided looking at it, tried to deny its importance, tried to believe that it couldn’t possibly be the horror everyone said it would be.
Finally this afternoon, I got a new password, went online, and winced as I looked at my 401k. Turns out, there wasn’t much to look at. My gains of the last three years had all been erased, which I guess means I’ll be working as a Wal-Mart greeter instead of retiring to sunny Belize.
So now is as good a time as any to appreciate the aesthetic of minimalism. You know, rediscover the simple pleasures of life, the saintly joy of simplicity, the lilies of the field, etc. etc.
I know, the St. Francis act doesn’t fool anyone, not with a spiral cut ham waiting for me when I get home. Recession aside, I go on with my yuppie addictions to fancy coffee, olives, craft beer, wine and Panera bread. Lately I’ve gotten the newlywed syndrome, buying stuff right and left: a 12-megapixel SLR camera, a new cellphone and various home furnishings, even though our apartment is choked to the gills.
Let me admit it: spending money is fun.
But saving it can also be a pleasant sport, and living in downtown Waco has helped. After the wedding, Bethany moved from next door into my apartment, cutting our already low rent costs in half.
Lately I’ve been walking to work more often, as we’re experimenting with being a one-car household. It started just before Christmas, when the mechanic told us that Bethany’s 1992 Buick Century would need $550 of work — about the value of the car itself. No thanks, we said.
We considered buying a new car, but then began discussing it. Bethany is at home much of the day working on her dissertation, and only needs the car to go teach her class at Baylor or run errands. I’m a 12-minute walk from work, or a five-minute bike ride. So why spend $15,000 or so on another car? Think how many great parties you throw with that money.
It’s working pretty well so far. Today, I walked to work and then met her down at Salon Wabi Sabi just in time to go next door to Se Cocina. We split a parrillada, a flaming skillet heaped with vegetables, shrimp, beef and chicken. It was 20 bucks for more than two people could handle — perhaps the best meal value in downtown.
We’re also preparing ourselves for the next Great Depression by skimping on climate control. We keep the thermostat around 66 when we’re around the house, then turn it down to about 62 at night or when we’re out. And, knowing both of us, we’ll probably hold off on air conditioning until early July.
Just now my editor handed me a plug-in device for measuring electric usage, called a “Kill a Watt.” She said I could borrow it if I’d blog about it. So, per our verbal contract, I’ll be getting back to you with thrilling tales of energy conservation.
Though I’m a skinflint in some regards, I’m a hedonist in others. So don’t feel sorry for me if you see me walking into the winter winds at dusk. I’m probably on my way home to a fantastic homecooked meal, along with the timeless pleasures of wine, woman and song.
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Bold strokes, small tweaks
The last day of 2008 was warm enough to walk to work and to lunch, and a good time as any to wax philosophical about New Year’s resolutions.
I passed up Schmaltz’s dripping sourdough temptations and made the long trek to McAlister’s Deli in search of slightly healthier fare.
My good intentions got me to thinking about the grim progression of resolutions: The holiday indulgence, the post-holiday bloat, the fantasy of drastic self-reform, the inevitable defeat, the gym membership unused, the pork rinds raided, the Spanish vocabulary CD gathering dust bunnies.
No resolutions for me this year, thanks. But resolutions for others? That sounds like a lot more fun.
This year the chamber will be hosting big community discussions about the future of “Greater Downtown.” The buzzword at the chamber these days is “transformative.” Make no small plans, they say. It’s not enough to do a little better each year; we need a game-changer, a Bold Stroke.
Journalists love to write about Bold Strokes, because they’re news, whether they’re a swan or a turkey. Politicians love to take credit for them. And usually someone gets rich from them.
One Bold Stroke idea is taking shape around City Hall, with the Town Square development, which is exciting for anyone who remembers the desolate asphalt plain that it replaced. Rick Sheldon is raising the ante, envisioning a billion dollars in redevelopment on the riverfront.
Meanwhile, up Austin Avenue, we’re seeing the results of a small-tweak approach. One by one, little vacant buildings are being renovated for small businesses. A bar here, a restaurant there, even an art gallery. It’s nothing “impressive,” really. But in time it could develop into a rich urban environment, with cafes, art galleries, street performance spaces, bookstores, pubs and the “characters” that inhabit them.
Unfortunately, you can’t build that atmosphere. You can only cultivate it and let it grow, perhaps in unexpected directions.
The dilemma is this: People’s memories are too long. The negative past trumps the positive present. The incremental improvements at say, downtown Waco or Cameron Park, can’t erase the shady reputations they acquired 30 years ago. Here’s where the Bold Stroke comes in. As some of us saw in Chattanooga, Tenn. this summer, a big project like a world-class aquarium can change people’s perceptions and signal that things have changed.
Fair enough. But it’s not enough. Think of those New Year’s Resolutions. Losing pounds is pointless without the daily discipline to keep them off. Getting organized is worthless without daily habits to keep you there. The Bold Stroke is only a prelude to an endless series of small ones, the long drive before the short putt. You can build a Town Square development in a year, but to rebuild a vibrant downtown around it, business by business, tweak by tweak, may take years.
But enough self-improvement claptrap from me. I want to hear your resolutions for downtown. I’ll give you mine, mostly in the category of small tweaks.
- Good sidewalks everywhere.
- More quick, good, cheap places to eat, where you don’t have to tip.
- A coffeehouse, open at night, with live music.
- A real pub with lots of on tap and a biergarten.
- Lighting on the Riverwalk.
- A multi-day music festival along the Brazos.
- A Farmers Market on the east side, evolving into a market district that will shame
Canton.
- A convenience store or drug store.
- A bookstore, with a newsstand featuring the Tribune-Herald, better than ever under new, enlightened local ownership. (Make no small plans, right?)
I’ll see you around downtown next year.
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Freedom Fountain Redux
In my last installment I asked for your thoughts on relocating the Freedom Fountain. I also promised another entry with my solution.
It was to be an elegant solution, one that would free up space for the convention center expansion, beautify the riverfront and pay homage to the spirit of the Wacoans who sought the release of Vietnam War prisoners in 1971. A solution so innovative that it proved I was not only thinking outside the box but had crushed and shredded the box and hauled it to the recycling bin.
I confess: I was stalling for time.
I did have a half-baked idea: Create a “horizontal fountain” that would flow from the current Freedom Fountain site, meander around the convention center area and flow to the river, possibly by the Vietnam War Memorial, cascade to the edge of the river, then get pumped back upstream to be recirculated.
After scoping out the site on foot I have determined that it could indeed be done, beautifully, for about an umptillion dollars.
My idea was stolen from the huge riverside aquarium complex in Chattanooga, Tenn. In the plaza, water appears to break through the concrete and create an urban brook that meanders toward the river. When I visited, the little stream was full of kids splashing around.
A horizontal fountain might work somewhere along the riverfront, but getting it from the convention center courtyard to the river seems a monumental challenge. The passage between the Hilton and the Convention Center narrows to the width of a cattle chute, then drops off abruptly into a loading zone on U-Parks.
Just goes to show that bad design is the gift that keeps on giving. The convention center complex was conceived as a “superblock,” but ends up blocking any foot traffic between Heritage Square and the river.
I also checked out the Vietnam Memorial area north of Washington Ave. bridge as a fountain location, but it’s also limited by design issues. Unfortunately, the curved wall on the street corner perimeter on University-Parks blocks the public’s view of both the memorial and the river. Not the best place for a showcase fountain. But maybe someone else can figure out a way to make it work.
Now I yield the floor to Chris McGowan, the chamber’s downtown guy, who sent me this box-shredder of an idea: A roundabout fountain. The city could construct an island in the intersection of Franklin and University-Parks to calm traffic (think London, not Waco traffic circle). I only wish I had Chris’ cool software stash.
So, dream on. A fountain doesn’t have to be a pool with a vertical jet of water. It can be a thing of beauty and surprise, a flowing, dancing metaphor for freedom.
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Your turn: The Freedom Fountain
Just got word that the city is holding a public meeting next Thursday, Dec. 18, at 5:30 p.m. at the Waco Convention Center’s Bosque Theater on the possible relocation of the Freedom Fountain to Indian Spring Park.
As we noted in last week’s story, the Freedom Fountain is broken and in need of about $200,000 in repairs, while the convention center needs the room. The fountain plaza was built in 1973, growing out of a trip Waco citizens made two years earlier to Paris to plead with the North Vietnamese for the release of POWs.
No point in waiting on the public meeting to weigh in on this. I’m curious about what people think about moving this piece of Vietnam War history.
On the one hand, “relocating” the Freedom Fountain is a bit of euphemism for what is actually the removal of one monumental fountain and the construction of a new one. That’s not an insignificant distinction: If you took out the Waco Suspension Bridge out and built a more modern one downstream, it would be a different bridge, even if it paid homage to the first one, and even if it incorporated some of the original cables. The fountain itself is a touchstone from a particular moment in history, and it can’t be replicated.
On the other hand, not everything has to be preserved forever, and right now, it’s not much to look at. Water hasn’t flowed from the fountain in several years, and the pumping system is obsolete. The massive concrete design is definitely early ’70s, and seems drab and outdated today. Some have noted that the live oak trees have grown up to obscure the fountain, but I’d say that’s one of the more attractive features of the current fountain plaza, giving it a cool, quiet intimacy.
In my next entry I’ll share with you my solution, which I think would beautify the downtown area and honor the ideals of those who pleaded for the imprisoned soldiers the year I was born. But first, I want to hear your thoughts. Let your imaginations run wild.
(But no 60-foot concrete POWs, thanks.)
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A Brazos Wedding, geese and all
Anyone who was there could probably give a more coherent account than I can. But here’s what I remember of my downtown Waco wedding, November 22, 2008.
Standing on the Waco Suspension Bridge, warming the hands of a beautiful, slender woman with white flowers in her hair. Snatches of Bach and bluegrass. The clink of metal hitting wood when the best man took the pillow from the ringbearer. The sound of metal rolling down between the slats of the bridge. The laughter of the crowd, realizing it had been hoodwinked by a quarter dropped from his pocket.
The crowd, pulling shawls and coats against the November wind: A startling collage of faces from high school, college, work, church, her family and mine. Cousins from West and East Coasts.
As we recited the vows, a motorboat made a joyride up the river, a raucous gaggle of geese protested our union and a vagabond woman strolled behind the assembled wedding party.
We said we would and we did, and then we kissed, and the crowd cheered and toasted us with glasses of wine and cider.
You might think this is taking my downtown schtick a bit too far, but our plans evolved with Bethany’s full consent. We wanted a different wedding, a simple wedding, without matching bridesmaids’ dresses, tuxes, engagement rings, wedding cakes, limos, all the overpriced flourishes of the “Wedding-Industrial Complex.” This sinister cabal conspires to oversell you on every detail or face the guilt of being a cheapskate on Her Special Day. Which is why the average Her Special Day costs $22,000, enough for a nice downpayment on a house.
What we didn’t realize is that simple is not a synonym for easy. A standard wedding would have been the course of least resistance, but with the help of great friends and family we pulled off something unique.
We had hoped for a Cameron Park wedding, but the clubhouse was to be under renovation and we didn’t want to gamble on the weather.
So we turned to a more urban setting. We rented Bledsoe-Miller Recreation Center and pavilion for the reception (perhaps the best deal in town) and worked out the ceremony location with another couple who had rented the bridge for evening. The Parks and Rec people were helpful, to the point of accomodating our quirky request to plant a baldcypress “wedding tree” on the banks of the Brazos.
Keep Waco Beautiful also cooperated graciously by relocating the headquarters of the annual Brazos trash pickup from Bledsoe-Miller to further downstream and cleaning up our section first.
The only hitch was the bras.
When we arrived for photos there was a chain of them, a rainbow of undergarments stretched across the iron railings of the bridge, flapping in the breeze.
We were assured these were merely for a quick photo promoting the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. Fortunately, the lingerie didn’t linger, though I assume the guests would have thought it was part of our mad design.
At Bledsoe-Miller, we feasted on barbecued chicken, brisket, black bean salad and 25 wedding pies that friends had made or brought, knowing we would prefer pie to bland wedding cake. Other friends played Latin folk music, jazz, bluegrass and doowop.
We planted the tree by the water’s edge. By the time it’s big enough to climb, I’ll be too old to climb it, but perhaps another generation of Smiths will be old enough.
For the getaway, we ran through a gauntlet of alleged “friends” who aimed blasts of birdseed into our faces. We boarded a canoe that was decked out with silky fabric, outfitted with a torch and “just married” pennant and tied to the dock on the Brazos. We paddled away into the Waco night — away from the riverfront where a crowd cheered, a wedding tree grew and a gaggle of irate geese muttered their disapproval — and back to our downtown Waco home.
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Man Downtown on the loose
An explanation for J.B.’s lack of recent postings: The Trib’s downtown blogger has been missing since Saturday and was last seen paddling across the Brazos in a canoe, with a beautiful woman and a tiki torch in front and a “just married” sign in back. A nationwide manhunt is on, and rest assured he will be returned to his computer soon.
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Stick a fork in this blog. Cause it’s dun.
... read the full comment by Homer | Comment on Our Man in Downtown Oaxaca: The Zocalo Read Our Man in Downtown Oaxaca: The Zocalo
HELLOOOOOO Is anybody home? -OK, so I’ll just take up where JayBee left off-
Back from Mexico, blah blah blah, Waco downtown is cool but underutilized, underdeveloped, underfed whatever blah blah blah. Damn this blogging is harder than
... read the full comment by anarchy | Comment on Our Man in Downtown Oaxaca: The Zocalo Read Our Man in Downtown Oaxaca: The Zocalo
I second Bear78’s motion. It’s been fun, etc., etc., but it looks like “Our Man’s” blogging experiment has run its course. All those in favor, respond by saying nothing for 3 months.
... read the full comment by S. O. Teric | Comment on Our Man in Downtown Oaxaca: The Zocalo Read Our Man in Downtown Oaxaca: The Zocalo
As much as I like JB, this thread was begun 8/18. I think it’s time for him to retire this blog-apparently the new owner has other plans for him. No sense in leaving material this stale on a blog.
We wish you well.
... read the full comment by bear78 | Comment on Our Man in Downtown Oaxaca: The Zocalo Read Our Man in Downtown Oaxaca: The Zocalo