west by northwest (by midwest)

If exposed pipes are “oxen guts,” then the city itself is (an? a singular plural?) “oxen.” Which, considering the importance of oxen carts to Brigham Young’s city design (every street wide enough for oxen carts to u-turn with ease), makes sense. It makes even more sense when I think about how the city makes me feel: a pilgrim against my will, always measuring my steps by their distance from the temple, always seeking or straying. I sometimes feel like a piece on a game board, pushed down this street or that alley, driven by an objective or purpose not my own. Every walk through the downtown feels like starting over, the first step toward figuring out this city, this game. It feels like a baptism of sorts, and for the Mormons, baptism and oxen are intertwined. In the temple downtown, believers descend into the basement as if into a tomb. There, they baptize the dead, give them a second chance. A living person stands in for the dead person, and is submerged in a tub balanced on the backs of twelve bronze oxen, each one representing a tribe of Israel. In this metaphor, “oxen,” are we the stand-ins, the walking dead?

I slipped down a random street today and was rewarded with a new “oxen” message.

The same “oxen” tag a little closer up:

Seeing “oxen” lay claim to a brick, I cannot help but think of Temple Square–in particular, the museum exhibit of oxen carts used to carry stones from local quarries to the temple construction site. The very word “oxen” carries a religious connotation here in Salt Lake City–a connotation I am just now beginning to grasp. It took a visit to Temple Square to (start to) understand it.

Every time I see an “oxen” tag now, I picture the literal beast loaded up with stones on its back. Or the baptismal font in the temple basement, with twelve oxen arranged in a circle, backs facing in, a baptism pool held aloft on their backs. The oxen represent the twelve tribes of Israel.

But I suspect this vandal means something radically different: political critique instead of religious proselytizing.  No matter where I find a new “oxen” tag, it always feels like a confrontation. Am I one of the oxen? Am I a beast of burden? Whose burden do I carry? Why? It also feels like a stab at the LDS–using one of the faith’s own symbols to mock(?) its followers.

Maybe I am making an assumption based on the medium (graffiti), but the whole “oxen” project feels anarchistic to me. When I wake up to new tags in the neighborhood, I wonder when “oxen” creeps out from his underground hiding place. I wonder what burden he carries that drives him to spread this (the?) word.

Vegan Straight Edge, downtown Salt Lake City.

Every morning lately, the city sidewalks greet me with new graffiti: Carpe Nocturne, Church of Snakes, oxen oxen oxen, oxen. Some kid (I assume a kid, which to includes anyone under 25) usually spray-paints them, though—sometimes in metallic black spray paint, sometimes robins-egg blue, often stenciled. That is, even though they smack you in the face as you walk over them, they theoretically can be washed away.

But vandals could not resist the wet concrete from recent sidewalk repairs a few blocks away. Or maybe they could not resist leaving a more-or-less permanent mark.

Look, I love artists like Basquiat and Keith Haring, so I probably sound like a hypocritical, fuddy-duddy, elitist crankypants when I say this: I despise graffiti. When I see a new tag every morning, I wonder if the neighborhood has gone to the dogs. I clench my key ring and wriggle the end of the longest one between my index and middle finger. And maybe it is just my biased perception of things, but people seem a little meaner, too—a little quicker to pick fights or cat-call. I chalk it up to the (admittedly flawed) Broken Windows theory in action. After all, if the cursive tentacles can worm into my amygdala, what brain buttons do they push in other people?

To be fair, the Vegan Straight Edge claims it eschews violence. Members do not drink or take drugs—a perfect fit for the Mormon culture here in Utah. Kids can tiptoe the bad-ass line but still remain true to their roots. And if a gang kid holds serious moral objections to hamburgers and chicken stix, well, one might feel just a little silly clenching her keys.

Or not.

This feels a little too Portland underground for me and my husband: militant, extreme, unrelenting, who-gives-a-shit-who-I-hurt-because-I-am-righteous.

I suppose if I must endure gangs in the neighborhood, Vegan Straight Edge is better than the alternatives I hear about in the media: drive-by shootings and drug deals at the street corner. But that is only if I believe the Straight Edge publicity. Can I? When I search the terms, I find a slew of militant logos of the “this is war” variety—some with guns. In Portland, militants always complained that the war cries came from the outliers, extremists who held no real place in the movements there. But at the same time, those “outliers” seemed to exert a great deal of power.

If there is no battle—no war, no us-vs-them—what does this tag mean by “We Win” and “Again?”

When I tell distant friends or acquaintances about the air problem in Salt Lake City, they inevitably remark that it cannot be that bad.  No way can I chew the air or taste the pollution on my teeth.  No way does it leave rain-puddle rainbows on my gums.  No way do I need to wear a mask on the red days.  These images must be hyperbole.

“If it were that bad,” several of them have said, “we would hear about it on the news.”

And this, I find fascinating.  Have we become so accustomed to mediated culture and 24-hour-news cycles that we no longer believe raw, unfiltered, eyewitness accounts – or what we used to call back in my journalism days primary sources? Does Anderson Cooper need to scoop a sample of Salt Lake City’s red-day air with a spoon and slurp a few sips – live, on camera – before the toxic soup transcends hyperbole and becomes real?

Some of these friends are nonfiction writers laboring for years on memoirs and personal essays. This, I find even more fascinating. One would think such writers would believe deeply – fanatically, even – in firsthand accounts. In being eyewitnesses to events. But memoirs, primary sources though they may be, are of course intensely mediated; the very act of crafting them into a coherent narrative – or in many cases, a marketable story – makes them into something different.  Truth, yes.  True, maybe not.  Or is that the other way around?

And one can say the same of this blog: I craft my posts carefully.  Does that make them any less true?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But it does make them mediated, and therefore, believable somehow.  For as soon as I stopped telling friends about the air and simply writing about it, the story finally found that rainbow connection.  And some choose to believe it.

Lately, Salt Lake City has seen more Red Air Days than Yellow ones. Just as with the terrorist threat level, neither rating bodes well for residents: both indicate elevated pollutants – threats to human health – in the air.

• Yellow just means the air is not quite bad enough to outlaw any burning. But try not to do it, anyway, please and thank you.
• Red means the air is so nasty it exceeds EPA standards – and burning is absolutely off limits.  Unnecessary and excessive driving, however, is perfectly OK- hell, even encouraged by the city’s very design.

And just as with the terrorist alert system, a Red Air Day inspires people to seal up their windows and stay inside with the air filter humming on high.

Unlike Homeland Security’s warnings, the air quality ratings are not hypothetical threats; they are fact.

Yesterday, the air in downtown Salt Lake had a bluish tinge to it, as if the entire city were locked inside a garage (that would be the mountains), and someone left the SUV running.  As if a riot had only recently been dispersed, tear gas still floating in the air.  As if a thousand guns had been fired, and all the shooters had mysteriously disappeared.

When the air thickens like this, it tastes like a decaying tooth cap – a metal one, pounded out from an old, dirty penny that soaked in a sewer pipe prior to being mined for use in the dental arts.  It leaves a film on my teeth (think oil rainbows on rain puddles), burns my tonsils, and clogs my sinus passages.  At times, my chest feels so tight I fear I might collapse.

I can chew the air and swallow it.  Sometimes, I call it Metamucil air, for it seems to have fiber and substance, which it turns out may be the secondary pollutants: when primary pollutants collide, they form new and often more dangerous toxins.  Heavy metals.  Maybe those are the slivers I feel between my teeth: filaments of toxic air.  Maybe that is why the air tastes like a dirty penny.  (And yes, I know that heavy metals are not little filaments.  Metaphors, people.  Metaphors.)

Last week, someone taped a handmade sign on an electrical box near a local gas station:

We are not canaries in the coalmine.  Stop driving for the f*cking air!

These days, the first thing I do upon waking is peek out the window to see if the toxic soup outside has thickened up overnight.  Then, I check the Utah Air Quality warnings for the day to determine whether it is safe to take a walk. Canaries in the coalmine, indeed.

Natalie Rose LeBrecht, a good friend of mine from the U of Iowa days, has always created profoundly original and strange (in a good way) music – the kind of music that you feel with your whole body, tingling even in your tooth caps and fillings. Lately, she has been sharing video art via YouTube.

Here, a girl (portrayed by Natalie herself) desires only the sweet burst of flavor from a new piece of gum, not the dull, rubbery taste of the one she already has.  She rejects the old gum and expects an instant replacement – instant gratification.  When she finds herself going without, she feels pain in the core of her being.

In a sense, it is the perfect metaphor for the fallout from the economic crisis in the United States. So many people who were used to having every desire fulfilled at the swipe of a credit card have suddenly found themselves going without, and it is not comfortable. I am not referring here to the (many) thousands of Americans who already lived on the poverty line before the crisis and face even worse prospects today; they already know what it is like to go without. Rather, I mean those who have become accustomed to splurges and indulgences – steak dinners, fancy cosmetics – who have suddenly had to cut back.

I cannot help but reflect, too, on the different reactions of Portland and Salt Lake City to the economic collapse.

When major banks started failing, my husband and I still lived in Portland, Oregon.  By the time the banks stopped collapsing one after the other, we lived in Salt Lake City, Utah.  The moods in these two cities during the economic crisis have seemed – at least from my somewhat outsider perspective here – completely different.  In part, this might be due to the vastly different economic climates in the two cities: Oregon’s unemployment rate hit 12 percent in April (with Portland’s rate not too far behind), while Salt Lake City has continued to enjoy relatively lower rates – just 5 percent. Predictably, people in Oregon feel the pain more acutely, since they have less hope for finding steady employment. One would expect a bleaker mood there.

But other differences bubble below the surface. In Portland, people tend to politicize every choice – right down to in-season, organic, local berries vs. out-of-season and/or conventional fruit shipped in from South America, but cheaper by $2. Choosing the former means supporting sustainable farming practices and keeping dollars local; choosing the latter is tantamount to contributing to environmental degradation – at least, that is how people tend to frame it, as an either-or fallacy with the power to induce severe guilt. These kinds of political commitments necessarily frustrate efforts to save money. After all, when we define our politics by our spending – voting with our dollars so to speak – it seems like nothing less than disenfranchisement when we are forced cut back and go for the non-local, conventional produce on sale for $3 cheaper per pound.

It isn’t all so political, though. Portlanders (many of them, anyway) also value the “hip factor,” which translates to worshiping good design at almost any cost: expensive jeans with fancy pocket designs, granite kitchen counters, bamboo flooring, and the list goes on. Sacrificing the “hip factor” can be profoundly painful for some.  Case in point: Individuals used to expressing their identity through well-designed clothes quite literally feel like they lose a little bit of themselves every time they choose, say, a  3-pack bag of cotton t-shirts at Target over the pricey (yet environmentally sustainable) tees offered up at boutiques in the downtown boutiques.  This again is the result of an either-or fallacy that divides “hip” and “cheap” into entirely separate categories.  Maybe, just maybe, there is a way to bring them together, but Portlanders did not yet seem ready to embrace this when I left.

By contrast, residents of SLC tend to think in practical terms: Where can I find the cheapest price on ______?  How can I combine sales, store coupons, and manufacturer coupons to save money?  Why would I pay $150 for jeans when I can get cheap ones at Wal-Mart or Target – or even better, used ones at a thrift shop? (Yes, there were “thrift shops” in Portland also, but they often charged outrageously high prices for used “vintage” pieces.) Frugality was a value in SLC long before the economic meltdown, so it doesn’t hurt as much to cut back even further now. Here, people tend to define their identities by how sensible and frugal their choices are – a form of sustainability that Portlanders tend to overlook.

I wonder, though, how much is lost – and gained – with either position, which is something I plan to explore in future posts.

But back to Natalie’s video. Watch it. It may be a metaphor for bleak times, but it is also quite funny.  Promise.

The most recent issue of Salt Lake City Weekly features an article about proposed changes to the panhandling ordinance in Salt Lake City.

One section of the Public Discussion Draft of the ordinance struck me as particularly interesting:

(4) False or misleading solicitation. It shall be unlawful for any person to knowingly make any false or misleading representation in the course of commercial solicitation. False or misleading representations include, but are not limited to, the following:

a. Stating that the solicitor is from out of town and stranded when such is not true;
b. Stating or suggesting falsely that the solicitor is either a current or former member of the armed services;
c. Wearing or displaying an indication of physical disability when the solicitor does not suffer the disability indicated;
d. Use of any makeup or device to simulate a deformity;
e. Stating that the solicitor is homeless, when he or she is not;
f. Stating that the donation is needed to meet a specific need, when the solicitor already has sufficient funds to meet the need and does not disclose that fact; or
g. Stating that the donation is needed to meet a need that does not exist.

I cannot help but think of all the other commercial solicitations I am exposed to every day: ads that feature heavily Photoshopped models designed to manipulate me into thinking my thighs are too lumpy, eyes too small, hair too thin, skin too wrinkly, or teeth not white enough. Just today, I saw a commercial for deodorant designed to smooth the skin in women’s armpits. Really? Is there an epidemic of scratchy armpits?

Why, I wonder, do panhandlers need to adhere to a higher “truth” standard than product advertisements? Perhaps it is because panhandlers, in essence, ask for donations, and charity should never be manipulated. Fooling unsuspecting pedestrians into paying for an imaginary “bus ticket home” is akin to a 501c3 organization funneling funds into a secret campaign. Or is it? After all, individual panhandlers do not have organizational charters.  They’re just people. If a panhandler lies, is it any different than when a kid saves up her school milk money in secret, so she can blow it all on 45 singles at the record store? (Yeah, I did that.  And yeah, I just gave away my age.) And is it really any different than an advertisement creating a “need” that doesn’t exist, so shoppers will whip out their credit cards? I do not mean to beg the question; I am honestly trying to understand the differences.

The biggest difference, at least so it seems from the political discussion, is where panhandling takes place -  public sidewalks, bus stops, and parks, mostly.  Citizens expect to enjoy public spaces without fear of being harassed.  But then again, other sections of the panhandling ordinance address these issues, with rules to prevent solicitation near outdoor cafe tables, ATM machines, and bus stops. The hope is that bank customers can use the ATM without fear of being robbed, and bus riders can count out their fare change without someone pestering them to spare a quarter. WIth those provisions in place, the “truth in panhandling” provisions make less sense. And let’s be honest: Commercials that lie to us about our bodies and what we “need” are plastered all over public spaces, too: billboards, posters, window signs, and even big-screen televisions in the windows of some of the downtown towers.

Even the sides of the TRAX trains feature a corporate “panhandler”: the Verizon guy telling me how much better off I will be on the 3G network.  Apparently, it is OK for this adverisement to disrupt my enjoyment of the city, but a panhandler cannot approach me at the bus stop.

To be fair, the Verizon guy can’t invade my personal space, touch my hand, ask me repeatedly for change, or follow me around the corner, as some panhandlers have done to to me in the past.  But the ad still changes my experience of the TRAX train; it still attempts to manipulate me into seeing a “need” where there is none.

On principle, I appreciate the “false or misleading solicitation” section of the ordinance. I do not think panhandlers should pretend to have a physical disability, or to be homeless, or a war veteran, in part because such false pretenses manipulate people into donating money.  More importantly, these tactics do an injustice to the people they are pretending to be – contributing to stereotypes and perhaps taking potential donations away from those causes.

But the more I think about it, the more questions I have, especially as I think back to similar debates in Portland, Oregon. I will write about this more in the future.

This is number three in a series of posts about two urban renewal projects that focus on train stations – one in Portland, Oregon, and one in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Yards at Union Station – Portland, Oregon

Living at the Yards at Union Station meant living between two of the most iconic bridges in downtown Portland.  If I walked one block northwest from my building, I took a path beneath the ramp for the Broadway Bridge, which to me always seemed more like a toy bridge than a real one, with its Lego-red paint job and decks that snapped open to let river traffic pass.  Whenever those decks broke apart, I braced for one of them to plunge into the river, even though I knew the counterweights made that next to impossible. I clenched my jaw, held my breath, waited.  I could not continue walking until the bridge became whole again. Sometimes, even after the decks rejoined, I stood under the bridge for ten or twenty minutes at a time, listening to car tires whistle through the grating above.

If I walked a few blocks the opposite direction, I passed under the ramp to the upper deck of the Steel Bridge, which in contrast to the Broadway Bridge always seemed somber and serious, secretive even. It felt simultaneously heavy and insubstantial: a charcoal drawing of a bridge rather than a real one, smudgy and dusty, as if it would leave a thick black coating on my fingers when I touched it.  In certain light, it looked like a Franz Kline painting, or maybe a Motherwell, but not quite that precise. I loved to watch the lower deck rise up, telescoping into the upper one, so boats could pass beneath.  In the springtime, I always thought the bridge was up to something naughty when it raised the lower deck: lifting its skirt so boat passengers could peek up inside.  In the fall and winter, with Portland’s moody rain pelting down, it seemed more intimate, as if the bridge was revealing a secret.

These two bridges marked the borders of the neighborhood and made it feel snug, intimate, secret.  More than that, they articulated two distinct poles of psychogeographic feeling: a desire to hide, to remain closed; and a sense that the place is not quite real, a Lego playland of sorts, the ultimate toy train station for adults.  Even the apartment buildings, painted in contrasting hues of red, blue, yellow, and green, seemed designed with a toy train station in mind. At times, I would stand in the courtyard and try to convince myself the place was real; that the people were real; that the trains really did screech into the station. I never could win that argument with myself.

At the Gateway district in Salt Lake City, I feel a sense of unreality, too, but it is different.  The mall there, with its heated outdoor walking paths and pale yellow brick, feels like something out of Disney Land or Los Angeles, completely out of place.  Even the main street name – Rio Grande – seems designed to create a feeling of displacement. This feels natural to a shopping mall, which after all, thrives on spectacle.  Without that disconnection from reality, shoppers are far less willing to whip out a credit card. But I wonder about the apartments there, and whether the residents feel like the mall marks a boundary for them, a line across which all reality slips away. Or, since they are otherwise isolated from the rest of the city, if the Gateway Mall actually functions like a Gateway into reality – into the bustling heart of downtown.

In a sense, it is impossible to know for sure.  As an outsider, I cannot experience the feeling of arriving and leaving home at Gateway (or, to be precie, the Northgate Apartments). Nor would I have reason to cross the boundary every day, as I did in the Yards at Union Station.  But I plan to craft some psychogeography experiments to at least get a glimpse of what this area really means.

On my way to the grocery store yesterday, I noticed a cluster of toddlers on the sidewalk up ahead, waddling along in slow motion, clinging to a rope held at either end by a daycare employee. The cluster was headed straight for me, and I dreaded the inevitable: children pooling up like a puddle as they circled around my feet. If I were not already halfway to the store, I would have turned around and walked back to the intersection so I could cross to the other side of the street. Instead, I fled to the grass, where I could continue walking and avoid the kids by a margin of at least two feet.

I encountered clusters like this in Portland, too, although not usually in my own neighborhood, and not very often. Every time it happened, I charged ahead as fast as I possibly could, counting on sheer speed to spare me from getting stuck in a clog of sticky fingers and faces. Most of the time, it worked. Kids backed out of the way, and I hurried past, while the daycare staff warned them against speaking to “stranger danger.”

Yesterday, though, as I stepped onto the grass, one of the children looked up at me and and sang out hello as she let go of the rope and opened her arms wide.  On the surface, this seemed simple enough, but I wasn’t quite sure how to react. Was it even appropriate to talk to a strange kid?  Would the daycare staff panic?  As I considered this, several other pedestrians walked by and nodded at the kids, saying good morning in sing-song tones. The daycare staff smiled back, encouraging the kids to respond to every person.

At that moment, I realized my policy of disengagement was not going to work here in Salt Lake City. Just as the downtown forces me to confront the compass, it also forces me to engage with children – two-foot margin or not.

For three of our nine years in Portland, my husband and I lived in an apartment complex built right on top of the Union Station train yards in the NW sector of downtown.  It was called the Yards at Union Station, and at first, I thought of it as a romantic oasis. It sat just a few steps away from the Willamette River, on the edge of both China Town and the Pearl, so it felt like a convergence of cultures, aesthetics, and even food – just like the train station itself, where travelers (many, I believe, from Europe and Asia, touring the coast by train) took their first and last steps in Portland.

I loved that I could stand on my balcony and watch travelers exit and board Amtrak passenger trains, or stare out over an empty track and follow its path into the horizon.  It felt comforting somehow, to think that leaving or arriving was such a simple thing: a straight line, predetermined, easy to follow, no getting lost.  It also appealed to my Midwestern sensibilities: drawing in a vanishing point where there seemed to be none.

But after a few months, my view of the place changed.  The only way to access the apartment complex was by crossing a pedestrian bridge that arched over the tracks, or by walking the long way around the station and crossing the tracks a few blocks south – this time no bridge. Often, this meant waiting for trains as they lurched forward and backward for as long as a half hour – not exactly comfortable in the pouring rain with a bag of groceries balanced on my hip.

I resented waiting for the trains, so I usually chose the bridge.  But after some time, the bridge became its own kind of barrier.  As I walked the path between two of the buildings in our complex, I felt vulnerable and exposed. A body had been found floating under a nearby river bridge, murdered by a resident just a few buildings down. Crime maps lit up like Christmas trees on our stretch of Naito Parkway – robberies and thefts, mostly, but also assaults.  I wanted to leave without alerting the neighbors – total strangers except for two fellow health nuts I met in the onsite fitness facility.

The bridge itself swayed with the slightest footstep or breeze, an intentional part of its design that left me breathless and dizzy no matter how many times I crossed it. I had to work myself up to crossing, breathing deeply and reminding myself it was meant to be unstable.  Maybe because of this, crossing it felt like a commitment. If I crossed, I had to stay on the other side for at least a few hours.  It became a game I played with myself: timing how long I stayed out there.

At first, no businesses moved into our little neighborhood, despite the demand for cafes or grocery markets. It felt like a dead zone, a place to sleep and shower, but not a place to live.  For that, we had to face the bridge and venture out into the city, which felt increasingly like a separate place. Toward the end of our three years, a sandwich shop and convenience store moved in across the street, but even then, the place seemed eerily quiet.  I never saw anyone walking into or out of those store fronts.

And all of this does not even take into account the thick, black dust that accumulated on everything in the apartment, no matter how often we vacuumed or cleaned – train exhaust raining down on our desks and computer keyboards, our kitchen counters and bedsheets. The windowsills, if left alone for more than three days, looked like some kind of Dust Bowl nightmare.

Which is why I find the Gateway development in Salt Lake City so fascinating.  This is another example of a recycled train station, replanned and re-purposed as part of an Urban Renewal strategy. Instead of focusing on housing alone, the Gateway development constructed an urban shopping center on the grounds of the former train yards, as well as an apartment complex that sits just behind the mall.  The train depot (pictured above) became a music venue and event space, while also serving as the official “gateway” to the development.

The mall has been such a success that some residents blame it for drawing businesses – including the offices for the Salt Lake Tribune – away from the city center and into the Gateway mall. On the one hand, I admire the vibrancy here. The sheer numbers of shoppers, movie-goers, and music fans stands as testament to the success of the development.  People use spaces that they like, and the people have spoken. On the other hand, the architecture of the mall leaves much to be desired, and most of the shops are corporate chains that one could find anywhere – nothing special or new.  The housing development, meanwhile, has many of its own issues – some of them similar to the ones we faced in the Yards at Union Station in Portland: noise and air pollution (though not from Amtrak trains), crime, and a sense of feeling vulnerable and exposed.

I plan to explore this a little more in future postings, because both sites shake up basic ideas of Urban Renewal, and both fail and succeed in interesting ways.  Their successes and failures also depend somewhat on the larger context of the cities in which they were built, and from the point of view of someone who has lived in both cities, it is quite fascinating to think about why.