Washed Away

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Beneath the water lie memories of vibrant villages.| Originally published in The Magazine, September 11, 2014.

Sally Norcross stands outside what was once her childhood home, in the heart of Dana, Massachusetts. She and her family left town 76 years ago, but she has clear memories of throwing crabapples into the yard of her grouchy neighbor Mr. Vaughn. Across Main Street is where she used to sit in school and watch out the window as the men dug up all the graves in the cemetery.

The bodies and headstones were relocated and the town of Dana abandoned. Her family’s house is an empty stone cellar overgrown with brush, like the remains of all the other buildings that made up the town. Dana is one of four towns that once lay in the Swift River Valley. All four of them are gone. Dana is unique in that its town common is the only one of the four that’s still above water and accessible.

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Diller Island: Private Park Funding Gone Overboard

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Consider for a moment that a billionaire is planning to literally reshape the shoreline of Manhattan by funding a floating island park, just a short walk from his office. Maybe, just maybe, private funding for parks has gone too far.

Media tycoon Barry Diller and his wife, fashion icon Diane von Furstenberg, have pledged $130 million from their foundation—around 75 percent of the total bill—to create a 2.4-acre park that will hover off the Hudson shore.

While there’s been widespread concern about outsized influence of the wealthy on New York’s public spaces following huge donations to Central Park and the High Line, this one takes things to a whole new level. See full post at Inside Philanthropy.

The New Golden Age of Urban Parks Philanthropy (And Its Controversies)

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Private funding is pouring into parks lately, and not everyone is happy about it. Regardless, cities are putting together creative projects with massive backing from wealthy donors, and it’s not all happening where you might expect.

Every city, it seems, wants to launch the next High Line. The abandoned-railway-turned-park in Manhattan is the poster child for private funding developing urban green space, and giving a shot of vitality to surrounding neighborhoods. Projects like that one are sprouting up all over the country, whether by nonprofit conservancy or public-private partnership.

Parks philanthropy seems to be surging at the intersection of a few trends. For one thing, you’ve got the overall concentration of wealth and concomitant rise in philanthropy nationally. Then there’s the fact that many city and state budgets have suffered following the economic crash, and parks aren't a top priority. But there’s also what one urbanist has termed the Great Inversion, in which the middle- and upper-classes are flocking to city centers, who miss those nice parks left behind in the ‘burbs. As for urban areas still struggling to lure people back, parks and bike paths are seen as the kinds of amenities that attract educated professionals to put down stakes.

Read the full article at Inside Philanthropy.

Blue Line 9: Metropolitan Woods

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Mix of mostly instrumental, electronic, ambient music and other sounds. Welcome to the neighborhood.

  1. Sin Guia, No, Juana Molina

  2. Tricky Pose, The Range

  3. Nouveau Nova, Daedelus

  4. Sister, Christina Vantzou

  5. Silo Tear, Kid Smpl

  6. Ghost in the Room, Oneida

  7. Liminality, Fennesz

  8. The Field, Jon Hopkins

  9. The River, John Hopkins

  10. I'll Be Around, Yo La Tengo

Mad Scientist Club

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In an otherwise unremarkable room at MIT, the published history of science fiction overflows. | Originally published in The Magazine, June 19, 2014.

By Tate Williams

Decades before Guy Consolmagno had an asteroid named after him in honor of his contributions to planetary science, he was a directionless history major at Boston College. Then he saw what MIT was keeping in a room of the student center. He knew he had to transfer.

It wasn’t MIT’s research on meteoroids and asteroids, or its contributions to NASA lunar missions, or even the early stages of what would become the Internet, though all of this was happening on the Cambridge campus around 1970. Rather, it was a bunch of novels. Thousands and thousands of science fiction novels.

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In Detroit, a Groundbreaking School Comes Back as Condos

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Originally published at Curbed on June 18, 2014. 

Due to plummeting enrollment and a troubled district, vacant school buildings—heck, just vacant buildings—are none too rare in Detroit. After 19 years of abandonment, the Nellie Leland School, however, is no longer vacant—it, as abandoned urban buildings are want to do, is back in session as condos. When it first opened in 1919, vacancy was far from anybody's mind; in fact, demand was so high that it had a waiting list for admittance, and two years after opening had to build an expansion that more than tripled its enrollment. The reason Leland was such hot property? It has little to do with the economy, and everything to do with the fact that it was the first opportunity most local students with disabilities had for a public education.

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Blue Ant > Surveillance Armor, or The Ugliest T-Shirt in the World

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Surveillance is a part of how we live now, and how we respond to that runs throughout the Blue Ant trilogy. The books are laced with true developments like widespread CCTV, drone surveillance, and computer spying. Like Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, Zero History traffics in crafty ways to dodge prying eyes. One of these techniques, at the time of the book’s publication, was entirely fictional, but perhaps less so today. And of course, since it’s on the surface a book about fashion and marketing, the secret weapon in question is a T-shirt.

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In the Garden Cemetery: The Revival of America’s First Urban Parks

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First published in American Forests magazine spring/summer 2014. | 

In the 1820s, America's cities had a problem: People kept dying, and church burial grounds were filling up. Fortunately, a group of horticulturists in Massachusetts had a solution and, in 1831, Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge became the first modern cemetery. Other cities began to follow suit, dedicating rolling, scenic tracts of land on the outskirts of town to honor the deceased. This “rural cemetery,” or “garden cemetery,” movement not only temporarily solved the problem of where to put the dead, but it also gave us the nation’s very first parks.

Over the decades, cemeteries fell out of vogue as cultural centers, but their fall from favor was not to be permanent. Today, the practice of using cemeteries for outdoor recreation is bubbling up once more, as urban dwellers seek out nature in the city.

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Blue Line 8: Heart Worm

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Mix of mostly instrumental, electronic, ambient music and other sounds. More beats than most.

  1. Shoouss Lullaby, Teebs

  2. Garvey's Ghost, Max Roach

  3. Eclipse, Floorplan

  4. Knowing We'll Be Here, Daniel Avery

  5. Renata, Holden

  6. Metal Swing, The Range

  7. Xtal, Aphex Twin

  8. Reaper, Teeth of the Sea

  9. Hiders, Burial

Blue Ant > Origins of the Gabble Ratchets

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Originally on Blue Ant blog.

Gabriel Hounds is a brand of jeans in the same sense that Zero History is a book about fashion. Both statements are technically accurate, but only as a gateway to something…slippery. In Gibson’s 2010 novel, the Gabriel Hounds are a “secret brand.” The Kaizer Soze of pants. The smoke monster of denim. The brand is the MacGuffin in a hunt for truth beyond brand names, knockoffs, seasons, and flickering atemporality in a world that is evolving faster than we can focus our eyes.

Setting aside for a moment the product itself, and the very concept of a secret brand or a microbrand, a line of products marketed through non-marketing and secrecy (we can get to that later), the concept of a Gabriel Hound is a fitting one for the brand at the center of Zero HIstory.

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