Venice - You are on My Mind

Rialto Bridge - Inspired theaters around the world!

The magical city of Venice has been on my mind recently – a lot in fact. First of all it is a central focus of my new Sharon O’Mara Chronicle (see books left and right) where she confronts evil doers at the Guggenheim Museum (Where does she hide that gun?), to the America’s Cup races that will be held next week just off the quay at Piazza San Marco (GO HERE) (the Naples races were just fascinating), to a wonderful video that my friend Aaron Renn found and posted on his Urbanophile blog. It is posted last in this week’s column - just so you won't get distracted.

Venice has no other urban equal in the world. It is a city that has inspired plays, books, art, music, casinos, wars, copycat development, and tourists.

Wikipedia says:

The name is derived from the ancient Veneti people who inhabited the region by the 10th century B.C. The city historically was the capital of the Venetian Republic. Venice has been known as the "La Dominante", "Serenissima", "Queen of the Adriatic", "City of Water", "City of Masks", "City of Bridges", "The Floating City", and "City of Canals". Luigi Barzini described it in The New York Times as "undoubtedly the most beautiful city built by man". Venice has also been described by the Times Online as being one of Europe's most romantic cities.

Well, duh! You can always count on the NY Times.

Guess?

Venice is unique. There is no other city compares to its location, drama, history, and charm. It’s also a business and glass manufacturing center, it has a commute, albeit by ferry making its rush hour a bit different. It is a rabbit warren of narrow alleys, canals, piazzas (piccolo e grande), and magnificent plazas like Piazza San Marco.

Antonio Vivaldi was born there, Igor Stravinsky is buried in its cemetery Isola di San Michele (along with poets Pound and Brodsky whose ghosts argue about Fascists and Communists).

Unlike other European towns, Venice has not radically altered it appearance to meet the demands of the modern world like London (Old City/Canary Wharf) and Paris (La Defense - see below). While a small town with only 270,000 souls on its 118 islands (60,000 permanent residents in its Centro storico) it swells daily during the tourist season by 50,000 or more. Residential prices have climbed to such heights that many are moving out – it's too expensive to live there. Historic preservation makes fixing peeling plaster a building permit issue. Studies on its inevitable sinking into the Adriatic are stacked twenty feet or more (they might make excellent pilings at some point). Everyone who comes to this village leaves refreshed and amazed – it will change your perception on urban issues and design.

 Separated at birth!

Venice, California (1905) was one idea – run canals through a real estate project – sell lots – make millions – it did. In the 1920 the great urban designer John Nolan was hired to plan Venice, Florida, which also sold lots but with a decided lack of canals. Writers have written about Venice and made it a character in their own books (moi aussi), this website is an excellent list of just how many books (hundreds) have included it (CLICK HERE). I have been told there are interesting canal cities in China and elsewhere but please, can you name them? Just try and find Suzhow on your map.)

The creation of a new community is difficult at best, many need to marinate and have time smooth the rough edges, fix the flaws, fill in the holes. Two millennium will help. Try to build a new city is just crazy – ask China about their new and ultra-modern empty cities.

Venice is about details and images, it is a village with flaws (graffiti on roll-up shop doors invisible during the day, not so much at night) and pollution (a lot of diesel fumes in the air), but it’s also pots of flowers from balconies, a rare tree here and there, wonderful food, and a singular sublime texture not found elsewhere. Maybe it’s the lack of the ubiquitous Vespa roaming in gangs in every other Italian city, or the traffic, or the tour buses. Maybe it’s also the silence, a great urban environment that is quiet – amazing.

Here is the video from Joerg Niggli - let it load first before you start!

If it doesn't load CLICK HERE

Stay Tuned . . . . .

Is the City of San Francisco Really This Stupid?

Piers 27-29

Thanks, AECOM and America's Cup Event Authority

What’s really fun is being asked to go to a party and not having to do anything. Just sit back and enjoy. Then they tell you that the party is at your house! Holy hasheesh Batman! Should I mow the lawn, vacuum the carpets, buy wine? Then they tell you there will be maybe a million guests and they all will be staying upstairs. And, oh, and by the way, we don’t really like the way the rooms are laid out, so could you remodel?

Now if the house was in really good shape and all the lights worked and you were just too busy, my guess is that you would politely say, no. But since your house is a wreck, the floors are rotting, you can’t even use most of the rooms, and yet, for some reason there is a magical mystery about the place, you might respond: “Batman, I think we have a stooge in the wings, I think we can pull one over on them and get this place remodeled and maybe even fill some of those rooms upstairs. What do you think?"  Wink, wink, they won’t know what happened to them.

Larry Ellison and the America’s Cup organization had offered to spend between $50 to $60 million (and probably more) to fix up the mess at Pier 29 (potential tourist central on the Embarcadero) and some of the working piers in the south part of town at #30-32. This also included some additional redevelopment near Pier 29 along the Embarcadero. The Pier 29 area is a potential primo tourist location and is half way between Fisherman’s Wharf and the iconic and recently remodeled Ferry Building. Done right this would be the “stuff dreams are made of.”

As usual San Francisco, this finest of cities, looked the gift horse in the mouth, not once but maybe a ten times, then asked for the vet’s report, the blacksmith’s report, the saddle-maker’s report and eventually the glue shop to see if this was really a "horse."

I think the Port of San Francisco (run by its own commission) liked the deal, maybe a lot. But the politician’s had to get in their own two cents and it cost the Port and city millions. In an article by Eric Young, a writer with the San Francisco Business Times, he says and then quotes, “The fizzled America’s Cup deal is ‘a loss for the city,’ said Gabriel Metcalf, director of San Francisco Planning and Urban Research association, a policy group. ‘The port does not have enough money to rehabilitate the piers. We’re billions of dollars short and with no real prospect for coming up with the money.”

The real development action is supposed to takes place in and around Pier 27, where the America’s Cup Village will be located and the hopeful shops, restaurants, and race viewing will take place. Later this will become the San Francisco Cruise Ship Terminal, if we’re lucky it might be as nice as Vancouver’s.

The potential investment of $55 million is now $18 million. The revised plan eliminates those pesky mega yachts that were expected (40 stalls – they will now probably park in Oakland where the meters are cheaper). But for now, if they show up, they’ll have to fend for themselves.

While I am a big fan of watching the rich play with their toys, I’m not sure how many locals are going to line up along the piers, jetties, and shorelines to watch these sailboats. They are very cool, I can tell you that, very fast and when the AC45s dig their nose into the Bay, spectacular somersaults can happen; these boats can shake sailors off like fleas from a dog. And when the big boys, the AC72s, come in late summer 2013 it may be magical. But, it’s my guess. that after the preliminary races in San Diego earlier this year when the crowds were one person deep, the Cup people began to reassess what $$ they really wanted to put in.

Like fleas off a dog!

  

Thanks Zimbio (GO HERE)

The boats are racing in Naples and Venice later this spring and back in San Francisco in August. This is all part of a preliminary series of races called the World Series. The overall winner gets to race the Oracle Team and Larry Ellison. Ah yes, big boys and their toys.

Stay Tuned . . . . .

On the Waterfront

I am doing research for my next fiction work that primarily takes place along San Francisco’s waterfront. I am spending a fair amount of time there: walking, eating, and of course drinking. Waterfronts intrigue us - beaches, marshes, the littoral edge between the land and the sea. Biologists tell us this is where life may have begun and it’s still the source of much of the life in the sea. But we humans can certainly change it for our own use. Piers, wharves, docks, harbors, jetties, breakwaters are just a few of the words we use to describe our efforts to access the lakes and oceans. We probably have as many words for our waterfronts as Eskimos have to describe snow. But words are just that, words. It is how we physically treat this edge that concerns me and this week’s missive.

Now, after a year and a half kind reader, you know I am a lover of cities and things built. But is pains me when politics trump good design and progress. San Francisco’s simplistic belief (eventually codified in law) that only waterfront-oriented things should be allowed along San Francisco’s edge (especially within the urban areas) shut down waterfront development for a good chunk of the past forty years. No shipping container industry (see Oakland), no hotels (see Boston and Miami), no cruise terminal (see Vancouver and Miami), only the endless wall of empty warehouses from a bygone era now used as parking lots and storage. San Francisco Bay is seen in flashes as you drive down the Embarcadero. Chain link seems to be the favorite decorator item. There is embarrassing kitsch, some of the worst and best, in the “Fisherman’s Wharf” area, that suck a few dollars out of tourist’s pockets – but then again it does parallel some of the reality TV shows we American’s watch.

But then, like a mugger, the 1989 Earthquake struck. There used to be, like Seattle and Boston, a freeway between the City’s urban core and the water. For years the City fathers and mothers argued over taking it down, their excuses were legend and now humorous. God, acting as the ultimate city redevelopment administrator, fixed the problem and changed the debate. It became the catalyst of a wonderful waterfront north of the base of the Bay Bridge.

The Giants, San Francisco’s World Champion baseball team, argued and fought to build a downtown stadium, political futures were won and lost in this debate, as well as millions of dollars. Now this incredible waterfront stadium (sixty homeruns have landed in the Bay) host’s football games, operas, motocross, as well as 81 National League baseball games. The growth along King Street is short of miraculous. I remember thinking about buying a warehouse in this area back in the mid-80s, was something like $150 K; what is it worth now? Again, it is this vision thing.

Mission Bay is turning the lands south of China Basin and King Street into a modern wonderland of bio high tech and housing straddling Third Street, a new waterfront park is proposed, plazas and urban development stretch for a mile and a half south of AT&T Ballpark. The wars fought were legend, books will be written.

Now with the upcoming America’s Cup, more changes are going to be forced on San Francisco’s waterfront. Deadlines are a wonderful thing. For better or worse, grand redevelopments that need to meet an unchangeable deadline push the envelope and the politicians. The Olympics and World Trade Fairs fall into this category. And now, again for better or worse, so does the America’s Cup. For Pete’s sake it’s just a silly sailboat race between very, very, very rich people sailing waterborne suicide machines. Seventy-two foot catamarans built of high tech carbon fiber, with bulletproof sails, and pushed by software. They fly (literally) thirty miles per hour or more, and crash in the most spectacular ways. And they will change the waterfront even more.

And I am in favor of it. Just like the collapse of the Embarcadero Freeway in 1989 and the opening of AT&T Park (PacBell Park then) in 2000, the impacts of grand plans (or disasters), change the perspective of a city and its view of itself. And maybe, just maybe, we will see more of the Bay when this is all done.

Stay tuned . . . .