Why We All Need a Shake Up Now and Then

Sometimes having the earth move under your feet is what it takes to make healthy change.

Grassroots and urban and community development activist Jane Jacobs knew this well, and here in San Francisco there is a particularly wonderful Jacobs-style parable of such change.

We just spent the morning at the huge and bustling Saturday Farmers' Market here in San Francisco, at the beautiful Ferry Terminal building at the foot of Market Street. The market is one of the nation's largest and most acclaimed, serving a wide variety of farmers and food producers, plus approximately 25,000 customers a week.

The Ferry Terminal building, which famed columnist Herb Caen called "a famous city's most famous landmark," was opened in 1898. It was the transportation focal point for everyone coming to the city from the Gold Rush through the 1930s, when both the city's bridges, the Bay and Golden Gate, were opened to car traffic. The steel frame construction became the largest such foundation for a building over water anywhere in the world--and importantly has survived two major earthquakes, the 1906 and 1989.

What didn't survive the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake is as important to today's vibrancy of the Ferry Terminal building and its markets as what did: the double-deck Embarcadero Freeway. Built across the face of the Ferry Building in 1957 at the height of the nation's car craze, with Eisenhower's highway act and urban and transportation planners such as Robert Moses in full steam, it cast the historic building into obscurity, cutting it off from the city.

Jacobs successfully stopped Moses from building a similarly raised highway through Lower Manhattan (the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, or LOMEX), along Broome Street, in the mid-1960s--but she never had such dramatic help from Mother Nature. Many of Moses' auto-centric designed and driven projects--the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Cross Bronx Expressway--divided and separated New York's poor neighborhoods, casting them into the gloom and filth of the expressways' shadows.

The 1989 earthquake so damaged the Embarcadero Freeway that it was completely torn down in 1991 and never rebuilt. The immediate impact on the historic Ferry Building was striking. Increased auto congestion caused the re-institution of many of the cross-bay ferries, and the building, suddenly re-connected and visible to the city, began to come back to life. The renovated building now holds 65,000 square feet of marketplace, with an additional 175,000 sf of premium 2nd and 3rd floor office space. With its unmistakeable clocktower gracing the intersection of Market Street with the Bay and the communities across it, it is once again a bustling central location for the city's residents; and one of the city's most grand and cherished landmarks.

Jane Jacobs is cheering from her grave.

In Praise of the Fierce and Newly Dead: Eve Nardone, 1929-2010

Fierce. Loyal. Passionate. Engaged.

These are the qualities that come to mind when I think of Eve Nardone, who passed away last week, the night before Thanksgiving, at the age of 81 in San Rafael, CA.

It is factually accurate to say Eve was my high school English teacher at Stonington (CT) High School in the late 1970s, but that doesn’t tell the story. Eve was the first person to believe in me as an artist, a writer, and a lesbian. She saw in that 15-year-old the person I was to become, seized that kernel of potential in her teeth and didn’t let go, shaking and hauling it through those difficult high school years when it would have been just as possible to let it go.

She was the first person I came out to.

She was fierce that way, and loyal, and I am thankful every day she was.

She came to Connecticut, and teaching English, from Europe along a route that remains mysterious to me in the way of so many of our most interesting life paths. But there was no mystery around Eve’s intelligence: her mind and speech were incisive, engaged with and passionate about culture and the world, and there were few if any subjects she deigned not to weigh in on (I just found online what may be her most recent, and last? bridge scores, from May of this year).

In addition to teaching a full load of courses, Eve had the passion and energy to mentor the yearbook for many years; to launch a Theater Club and take a full bus load of students to a Broadway show in New York City every year; to take groups of students to England, where she had spent her youth as a Czech refuge from World War II; to moonlight, as many teachers do, selling scrimshaw in a local gift shop. I rarely heard her complain of being tired (although I did hear quite a bit of grumbling about the lack of grammar in students’ writing, grumbling which I carry on, on her behalf, to this day): life fueled her. She loved to travel, to read, to go to the theater, to listen to music: and even had she not done such an excellent job teaching me how to write and understand English literature, the model she set for me in these regards was important enough.

When I first met Eve there was actually quite a bit of doubt as to whom I was to become. I’d known at 14 I was a lesbian (thanks to Jill Johnston’s Lesbian Nation and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle) and was trying to learn to use my body through girls’ sports, a place I hoped I could fit in. But I was a trumpet-playing bookworm with sketchbooks and notepads always on my person. Sports were a language I worked hard to learn, and one that in many ways made being gay only more visible—and all of us more vulnerable. I wandered into my sophomore year of high school, during the Bicentennial year of 1976, learning to drive; disillusioned by Watergate and Vietnam; hoping for a girlfriend; a little scrappy and hotheaded; and wanting, like all adolescents, to fit in someplace. This combination lead, as it so often does, to disaster. My parents had to haul me out of jail one night when I left several large members of the Westerly, R.I. police force in disarray.

I don’t think there is much question I represented a challenging and interesting project to Eve, and that’s OK: I’d proudly be her project again any day, and every kid should have an adult other than their parents who takes them on as their personal (and not necessarily school) project. I’m not at all sure what alerted her to my potential, but shortly after the police incident (while it seemed as though I was still wandering around the football field with a hangover) and before I knew what was happening I was an artist for our yearbook, the Pawmystonian, creating pen-and-ink sketches and drawings of our school mascot: anthropomorphized bears. I was hanging around at Eve’s house on weekends, eating frozen fried chicken with her and stumbling into my first girlfriend. I fully believed I had wrecked my life forever by my stoned brawling, but Eve pulled me through that year and into the next; now yearbook Art Editor . . . now Eve’s grammar class . . . now Theater Club . . . now house and cat-sitting for Eve . . . now Honors English . . . now yearbook Editor . . . now Eve’s nomination of me for the Mary Nania Award for Altruistic and Inspiring Leadership . . . now Bowdoin College . . . now taking the graphic arts skills I learned at the yearbook into my first newspaper job . . . now editing and writing for a national journal and small press . . . now working for the Village Voice newspaper . . . now helping to found and operate for more than 12 years a nonprofit theater serving the small New England community of—Stonington, ME.

Can you feel Eve’s hand in all of this? I do and always will. So much of what she taught me—from the difference between “which” and “that,” to how to lay out a page, to how to appreciate scotch responsibly and with pleasure, to how to think clearly, to how to easily and swiftly write clear, simple sentences, to how to take great pleasure in the act of writing—lives on in me today.

I lost touch with Eve after she retired and moved to California; she had always wanted the warmth, and to be near her children. My own writing and world-making consumed me at the time, and I let her go. I always regretted having done so, and was delighted last year when a mutual friend gave me her contact info. All too briefly, I was able to be in touch with her again, to tell her how much she meant to me. But it was too late for us to share any further experiences; she was losing her battle with cancer, and I was too far away.

Despite my sins (in what I have done, in what I have failed to do), I’ve had grace on my side: I have continued to have people in my life—mentors, friends, lovers, and colleagues—who remind me of Eve. That twinkle in her eye, slightly mischievous and always sparkling, deliberately exposing to you the fire that glowed inside of her; a twinkle you can see even in very recent photos of her. The fierceness of her loyalty once you were hers; the sharp, persistent scrawl of her red pen; the fullness with which she approached life in what she clearly understood to be a magical world.

Thank you, Eve Nardone. Thank you.

(Special thanks to Kelly Cordner for keeping me in touch with Eve; to Larry Bates for this photo; and to Eve’s daughter, Laurie, for being so kind to me during the days immediately preceding Eve’s death)

Desert Winds

There's something about dry.

My people are Yankees: i.e., east coast people and before that western Europeans.

We don't really know what to do with dry. We know humid.

The Southern California desert I'm currently writing from--Palm Springs, to be exact--is dry 354 (!) days a year. Dry and bright. Clear. The edges of the glorious date palms crisply glistening light against blue sky and brown hills.

But the dry desert brightness is only part of what fascinates about this place. Inhabited forever by the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians, who remain Palm Springs largest landowners, it is a place that reminds one daily that heaven is right here on earth (according to local legend, it received its current name when a Spanish explorer referred to it as "the palm of God's hand"). Grapefruits growing in the front yard, oranges in the back, etc. More recently for design fans it has become known as "an oasis of modernism in the desert" and some of the 1950s-60s architecture, objects, and decor are definitely swinging.

That's when the place really took off for white people--the 1950s and 1960s--when Hollywood stars suddenly discovered its proximity to Los Angeles and began to flock here in droves for drinks, golf, etc. Frank Sinatra lead the way with his "Rat Pack." Dean Martin, Cary Grant, Debbie Reynolds and yes, Dinah Shore--whose legacy remains in the annual spring golf tourney and "women's weekend," a.k.a. the largest lesbian bash in the country which bears her name--all owned homes here.

The stars got distracted and began to leave in the late 1970s at a time when Palm Springs threatened to become the Fort Lauderdale of spring break California. Now its retiree heaven and really, why not? I know we who live on Deer Isle, Maine extol the high quality of life in Maine, but during the winter its got nothing on Palm Springs. Yep, there are definitely more people and traffic here than in my very rural home; but many of us are crafty enough to avoid traffic and people when we want and need to.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Springs is that it manages, despite the excesses of second home owners and tourists, to retain a somewhat down-at-heels feel--something which makes it a sister of sorts to Deer Isle, although in truth many lobstermen make more than the average median incomes for Palm Springs. The median income for a household in the Springs was $35,973 and for a family $45,318. The per capita income for the city was $25,957. These figures obviously don't include the second home owners. About 11.2% of families and 15.1% of the population are below the poverty line. Important lesson: beware, communities, of creating economies dependent solely on the tourism/service sectors.

Bloody Bloody Populism

He's an orphan at 13 and an Indian-killing rock star soon after. And the people LOVE Andrew Jackson.

Why not? In the Public Theater's musical "Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson" now on Broadway, like any rock star Andrew is a sexy, angry, bloody mess who seeks our adoration. He urges us not to think about what he says and does, but just to love it. And we do, in all our contradictory glory: don't kill the indians, but don't let them live near us; tell the federal government to go screw itself, but wait! we want its money; etc.

We are supposed to find his adolescent rages and impulsiveness attractive, and many do in the same way Maine voters supported Paul LePage ("I'll tell President Obama to go to hell") or NY voters Carl Paladino . . . or Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh . . .

Why is Andrew so angry? "Life sucks . . . for me in particular," he sings, and doesn't it seem everyone has a chip on their shoulder these days? Unemployment is too high, taxes are too high, the cost of gas is too high, not everyone can afford a McMansion . . . it is a pretty tough life we've got going on here in these United States, but what are any of us willing to do to fix it? So we throw the bums out, be they Democrat or Republican, again and again and again because no one can really solve these problems without asking the people to do something--stop driving SUVs? stop watering our lawns and filling our swimming pools?--ourselves.

Obama would shudder at the relevance of the show's anthem to his Presidency: "And we’re gonna take this country back for people like us, who don’t just think about things.”

Because as most of us regretfully know, the problem is not in our politicians but in us, the electorate. "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson" brings that point home in 90 minutes of highly entertaining irony of the type seldom seen on Broadway.

Revisiting the Bear

I walked to the edge of gray ledge just off the Appalachian Trail and there, 36 miles away on a brilliantly clear November day, was the toothy profile of New York City glittering at the end of the Hudson River.

Bear Mountain is and always has been a kind of miracle to me and many others. Opened in 1913 just a shout up the Palisades from the clanging, smoking engine of New York City it is both living evidence of the culture of philanthropy of a different time, and of the awareness, spawned by the Industrial Revolution, that people had to get beyond the noisy environs of the city and into the "great outdoors." Fully launched with a huge gift of both money and land from Mary Averell Harriman, whose husband was the President of the Union Pacific Railroad, Bear Mountain is another of the many institutions which grace our lives thanks to the philanthropy of the great industrialists and robber barons.

I've hiked here, across the section of the AT and up the High Tor and through the Timp Pass and over Dunderhead Mountain, over the last 25 years with two of my own and several of my friends' dogs, the latest my friend Karen's 6-month old puppy, Bessie. The trails and my own past are alive for me with the golden happiness of Jessie; and the speedy alertness of Tosca (who was often just a black dot disappearing quickly over the oak leaf-strewn hills in pursuit of a deer) and her best friend Indy.

So up the familiar trail, which I've both hiked and cross country skied, to Doodletown we went, past the old reservoir and the town that the state claimed by eminent domain and existed there as recently as 1965 yet is now nothing but brush and historic markers. Out to Iona Island past the briny, reed-filled marshes. And finally down 9W back to the city, stopping for a black-and-tan at Sheeran's in Tomkins Cove before racing down the New York State Thruway and back into the city.

A perfect fall day for a former urbanite.