About Albany

December, 10 2021 by Nathanael Yellis

At a library booksale in the late 1990s, I found an old paperback of James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere. After years of playing sim City, I was vaguely interested in how real places were zoned and constructed. Kunstler gave me a language about urbanism and walk-ability and such that helped me explain why the swathes of parking lots surrounding everything were useless and ugly. He clued me into the truth: most new places being build and zones were being done badly.

Aside from reading some books about new urbanism and following some interesting blogs (like Strong Towns), I’d never really done anything about this interest until we moved to Massachusetts. Living on Capitol Hill in DC, spoiled us with a dense, walkable, beautiful neighborhood; then our brief sojourn in Georgia exposed us to a gross, car-oriented place. When we returned north, I knew we needed a real neighborhood and I needed a walkable commute. Thus North Beverly and living about 300 yards from a commuter rail station.

The idea that places can be made and remade is cool, but the risk of remaking is making them worse. Sometimes dramatically worse. That brings us to Albany: here’s a capitol city marred by giant highway onramps and even giant-er urban redevelopments. In the links this week are two walking tours of Albany by photographer Chris Arnade. His work is really interesting: showing the human scale of our places by walking around them. (If you want to truly understand the suburban dystopian hell scape, read his piece on Orlando.)

Speaking of making things worse, the third piece is a Times-Union article on the mid-century remaking of Albany with the Empire State Plaza. The pictures and quotes tell most of the story: in an area where people used to live and work, the government paid them off, moved them out, ripped down their houses, and put up an enormous, brutalist plaza, at enormous expense. Did it make Albany any better? Doubtful, but it’s sure different.