Karrie Jacobs

The atrium of San Francisco’s Embarcadero Hyatt.

The news from Mumbai was the leitmotif of my Thanksgiving Weekend. When not cooking or eating, I was obsessively scrolling through news reports on the tiny screen of my iPhone. How many dead? How many terrorists? Have they recaptured the Taj yet? What’s taking them so long?

Of the many appalling aspects of terrorism, the one that angers me most is the way that it exploits the openness that is a hallmark of urban life. Grand hotels like the Taj are not just there for those who can afford to spend the night, but are the key gathering places of great city. And spots like  Cafe Leopold, open to anyone for the price of a beer, promote the happy assumption that people of all backgrounds, origins and beliefs can and should freely mingle. Urbanity is the opposite of extremism, broad rather than narrow, inclusive rather than exclusive, and urbanity is pretty specifically the thing that’s been under siege in recent years, in Mumbai, Madrid, London, New York, and back in the 1990s, Sarajevo.

With this in mind, I read an article by Keith Bradsher in the International Herald Tribune headlined, “Attackers expose luxury hotels’ vulnerabilities.” The upshot is that all the things that make hotels appealing to their guests also make them exceptionally soft targets. The passage that jumped out at me was this:

The Oberoi and the old wing of the Taj hotel, where most of the fighting took place, both have high, central atriums. After throwing grenades and directing considerable automatic weapons fire at staff members and diners in ground-floor lobbies and restaurants, the attackers at each hotel ascended the atriums.

This allowed them to start hunting down guests while dropping grenades and shooting at commandos below who tried to engage them in combat.

Now, the atrium has been part of the language of hotel design for a long time, from the Victorian light court to the super atrium that debuted in the hotels designed by John Portman beginning in the 1960s, like San Francisco Embarcadero Hyatt (shown above) or the Westin Bonaventure in downtown Los Angeles. Lately, the atrium approach has been making a comeback, reappearing in Asia, as developers have taken to topping ultra-tall mixed use buildings with luxury hotels.

I have mixed feelings about atrium hotels. I think that the San Francisco Hyatt is the rare example that’s also good architecture. (Actually, the atrium of the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, shown below, is pretty stunning, as well.) Mostly I find the spaces more vertigo-inducing than spectacular. It’s only recently that I’ve come to understand the architectural purpose of the hotel atrium. It’s pretty simple: all hotel rooms needs to have windows, so hotel floors, unlike office floors, can’t be very deep. Hollowing out the building by placing an atrium at the center ringed by corridors of rooms creates an ideal floorplan.

But now, if we believe the IHT, this common hotel design strategy also turns out to be convenient for terrorists. I guess it’s worth asking whether there’s any feature of daily life that can’t be turned against us by those determined to prey on civilians, turning our cities into battlefields. I don’t believe that there’s an architectural fix for the problem of terrorism. And I don’t think that I’d enjoy living in a city that was so well-hardened that it was no longer a soft target. Nonetheless, it seems clear that security checkpoints will become more commonplace at hotel entrances around the world. As will blast proof glass. I wonder whether we might we also see Kevlar netting, perhaps disguised as sculpture, strung across atriums.

Burj Al Arab, Dubai. The state-of-the-art atrium.

The new O rack by Mahaffy and DeGreeve.

Yesterday, the winner of New York’s bike rack competition was announced and the winning design, by Ian Mahaffy and Maarten De Greeve of Copenhagen, Denmark (the most bicycle friendly city on the planet) is a refreshingly simple, functional looking O. (I say functional looking, because you never really know how well any bike rack works until you actually try to secure your bike to it with one of the cumbersome medieval devices that pass for bike locks in this town.)  At any other time, I’d have said that the circle with the crossbar is a revival of the ecology symbol popular in the 1970s, but in November of 2008, the O has an entirely different significance. Soon there will be 5000 of these Os all over town.

Obviously, it’s the year of the O. I noticed, for example, on the design firm Pentagram’s blog, that the P flag that usually hangs from its building had morphed into an O flag (see below) in honor of the Democratic National Convention. And when this week’s New Yorker arrived in my mailbox, illustrator Bob Staake had given the O that’s always on the cover a celestial quality. (Check out Staake’s animated version. Or should I say O-nimated?)

With Big Os everywhere, it’s no wonder that we’re still wandering the city suffused in a post-electoral glow. I guess that’s why they call it a honeymoon. Enjoy it while it lasts.

The O flag by Paula Scher of Pentagram.

July 21, 1969 and November 5, 2008

Wednesday’s paper was just sitting in the unruly pile next to my bed. I wasn’t even thinking about it as a collector’s item until a pal in Australia emailed me a story about people in NYC waiting in line to get the post-election edition of the New York Times. She asked if I’d managed to snag myself a copy. “It was easy,” I wrote back. “It was delivered right to my door.”

Anyway, I was gathering up the recycling today and actually remembered to save Wednesday’s front page and the special election section. But where to put it? Oh, I’ll store it in the plastic bag that contains the yellowing “Men Walk on Moon” edition. Equally momentous, I think, except that Obama’s victory feels like an even bigger leap for mankind, or, at least, for the little patch of humanity known as the USA.

Times Square, 11-04-08

Primrose St., Philadelphia 11-02-08

On Election Night, I walked through Times Square twice. The first time was sometime after 7. Obama had won Vermont and McCain had taken Kentucky. No surprises yet. No real news. I was enroute to an election bash at some club on W. 50th. The party turned out to be insufferable. Awful club. Too crowded. And every big screen TV was tuned to CNN. No MSNBC. No CSPAN. What kind of party was this? I didn’t stay. I went back to Times Square and stood for a while opposite the big, undulating ABC screen at 44th St. taking great pleasure in the spontaneous gathering going on all around me. People had come to Times Square to watch the election results as if it were New Years Eve, but without all the security apparatus and the manufactured jollity. When former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani appeared on the big screen as a guest commentator on ABC, a loud “boo” rose from the pavement. Somehow, on this evening, Times Square had morphed from a place for contrived public spectacle to a place for genuine public spectacle.

I stood there thinking about how politics actually works. On one hand, there’s nothing bigger in terms of national media presence, money spent, and production values than a presidential campaign. It’s all broad strokes — “Country First,” “Change” — and media blitz. But on the Friday before the election, I found myself sitting in a crummy little storefront in a part of Philadelphia miles from Ben Franklin and Betsy Ross’s old haunts, generating Google maps with a fellow Obama campaign volunteer named Mary.

We were making sure that the packets volunteers would be using for the weekend’s big Get Out the Vote (GOTV) drive contained clear, correct driving directions. Inside each packet was a detailed block by block list of the Obama supporters in one small section of NE Philly. Scores of canvassers would spend the next days “walking” the packets, ringing the doorbell of every known supporter and urging them to go to the polls on Tuesday. But some of the Google maps were incorrect, so Mary and I were generating new ones.

Mary would say to me: “Primrose Road and Lavender Street.” I would enter the coordinates into the computer and hit the print button. “Brous Avenue and Brocklehurst Street,” she’d say. “Blue Grass Road and Winchester Avenue.”

And it struck me, as we were working, that politics isn’t just about the big ticket image making and endless spin, but about this micro-scale process of identifying and motivating individuals, one by one. Tip O’Neil famously said, “All politics is local.” But I never really understood how local he meant until I found myself wandering the curving lanes of NE Philly, walking from one modest duplex to the next, clipboard in hand, Obama button pinned to my lapel, trying to remember to smile.

So there I was standing in Times Square watching the election unfold at Jumbotron scale, and thinking about all the little houses I’d personally visited in Philly, and all the doorbells rung by my fellow volunteers in that one neighborhood multiplied by many thousands of volunteers systematically ringing doorbells in neighborhoods across America. Standing in Times Square I was seeing the big picture, but what I was thinking about was how that picture is actually comprised of tiny pixels.

I snapped the iPhone photo (above) in Philly, while standing on the front steps of the duplex across the street thinking, “This is what politics looks like.”

P.S. For the theory of big and small, watch this 60 Minutes interview with the Obama team.

Parking Day 2008 on Montague St. in Brooklyn Heights.

For those of us who lived through the election of 1972, Sarah Palin’s rhetorical approach is like a horrible flashback. Richard Nixon’s political strategy was predicated on his insight that no one liked him very much, so to win he had to create a situation where Americans were more focused on hating each other than on disliking him. (Remember Spiro Agnew?) Acrimony was Nixon’s strategy (read Gary Wills’ Nixon Agonistes if you don’t believe me) and I experienced its effects first hand. As an isolated McGovern supporter in a New Jersey high school full of the offspring of rabid Republicans, I was routinely threatened and assaulted for being anti-American, for being a so-called Communist. A kid named Curt who sat in front of me in Western Civ., offended by my opposition to the war in Vietnam, actually said to me one day, “If I had a gun I’d blow your brains out all over the wall.” Western civilization, indeed. I am very grateful that I am not currently in high school.

The divisiveness being sown by the McCain-Palin ticket has an unpleasantly familiar tang. They, too, are trying to make divide-and-conquer work its magic. Among the many things that bug me is Palin’s parochial definition of what constitutes an American. At a fundraiser in Greensboro, N.C. last night, she expressed her pleasure at being in a “pro-American” part of the country. To clarify what she meant, the campaign sent out the following statement (from a pool report by Elizabeth Holmes of the Wall Street Journal):

“We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe” — here the audience interrupted Palin with applause and cheers — “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.”

She continued: “This is where we find the kindness and the goodness and the courage of everyday Americans. Those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food and are fighting our wars for us. Those who are protecting us in uniform. Those who are protecting the virtues of freedom.”

I love small towns. I’ve got nothing against them. But 80 percent of Americans live in cities and suburbs. I find it difficult to buy the notion that only 20 percent of our citizenry should be considered real. And, as the photo above demonstrates — it was taken on Parking Day in which parking spaces around the city are appropriated for other uses — we urbanites have dogs and children, flowers, and (tiny) picket fences. I would argue that Brooklyn, population 2.5 million, endlessly diverse and wildly complex, 2500 small towns rolled into one, is as American as it’s possible to be. Here in the big city we do kindness, goodness and courage, too. And one other thing: we really, really like to vote.

P.S. Yes, I’ve been neglecting my blog. I’ve been on endless deadlines and traveling. Here are two new pieces: Green Landmarks and Urban Farms.

Stay-Cation Park, on Court St., Brooklyn. Parking Day 2008. A lawn, folding chairs, pretzels…What could be more American? (Okay, these photos were shot on September 19. Parking Day has come and gone. I’m moving slowly these days. However Parking Day Redux is happening today, October 18, on W. 21st St. between 10th and 11th Avenues.)

The Metropolitan Opera goes jumbo.

Last night I took the subway up to Columbus Circle to check out the new Museum of Arts and Design (the old Huntington Hartford redone by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works) by night. I was hoping for an ethereal glow, but didn’t get one. Not quite. After sitting for a bit at the foot of the Columbus statue in the middle of the circle, an unexpectedly peaceful spot, I strolled down Ninth Ave., ate the red snapper enchiladas and drank a margarita at Hell’s Kitchen, and decided to walk at least part of the way home.

As I ambled east on W.44th St., I could hear a man singing opera. I figured that it must have been opera night at Carmine’s, the tourist-pleasing Italian restaurant. But when I entered Times Square I noticed that a block of Broadway was crammed with folding chairs, and the chairs were at least partly occupied by people with their heads tipped back. The image of an opera singer filled perhaps a half dozen big screens including two on 1 Times Square, one above the NASDAQ sign, one on the ABC marquee. And the music filled the south end of the Bowtie. I stopped for a few minutes, leaned on a mailbox, and listened.

As it turns out, this was a broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s opening night gala. It’s the third time it’s been presented in Times Square, and it was also piped in to movie theaters around the country. The Met presented portions of three different operas, La Traviata, Manon, and Capriccio.

What was extraordinary was not the visuals but the acoustics. The singing magically blanketed the most frenetic spot in New York. People who would never ordinarily even slow down in Times Square stopped moving, and stopped talking, and listened. It was a lesson in the power not just of opera, but of sound. It was a demonstration of what could happen if we took the soundscape of the urban environment as seriously as we take its visual qualities.

P.S. Here are a couple of things I’ve written recently: Fast Train Coming (Slowly) in Metropolis and Dubai’s Buildings of the Future in Travel + Leisure.

Okurin, the bunny-shaped, “eco-sensitive” gift bag.

I don’t know. It must be the season. Suddenly I’m seeing bunnies everywhere. The bunnies above were designed by a Japanese firm called Innocence, Inc. (kind of an oxymoron, isn’t it?) and they’re intended as a replacement for the ornate (and disposable) layers of gift wrap that the Japanese so love. I saw them at a remarkable display of all things Japanese, from high design to ordinary products, at the Felissimo Townhouse (through November 1). You should stop by if you can. It’s almost as good as a trip to Japan.

P.S. This bunny thing is supposed to be distracting me from politics, but it’s not working.

P.P.S. Oh, to hell with the bunnies. Watch this ad.