August in Oklahoma

I apologize for the more-than-month intermission between posts. Oklahoma City has been hot and rainy, and until about a week and a half ago, we didn't have Internet access. Moving into a house built in 1919 and living for a month without phone, cable, or Internet is like traveling back in time. Of course if we had traveled back in time, our home would have been much newer, the floorboards would have creaked much less than they do now, there wouldn't have been a jungle to be tamed in the back and front yards, and presumably we wouldn't have had to spend a whole afternoon ripping up a poorly laid brick walkway or two days painting over a rancid shade of mustard yellow on our bedroom walls. We're planning a big "Before and After" photospread, so stay tuned. Of course, the "after" part of that spread should really be called "now," as in "Before and Now." "After" connotes finality, as in our work here is done, which it patently is not. We'll be working on this house for years and years. Nonetheless, we've accomplished a whole lot. You'll see.

In the meantime, some observations and a small collection of photos.

Working on a historic home is much like restoring a city slowly hollowed out by the forces of suburbanization. Our old home has 37 windows--9 in our bedroom alone. But only one of these 37 windows is in working order. The rest have been painted and caulked shut for years and years and years. Why? Because when air conditioning became available and affordable in the 1960s, people thought they'd never have to use their windows again. Honestly. They assumed that having cold air reliably blast through floor and ceiling vents to create a controlled climate would be an improvement over the transom window system, whereby during the night you open the top and bottom windows to simultaneously draw in cool air and let out hot air, and during the day you close the windows to trap in the coolness. Not the best way to cool a house, admittedly. Assuredly, HVAC works better, infinitely so. No amount of adverbs can qualify that statement enough. AC works exponentially better.

But is this any reason to destroy the functionality of windows? I mean, isn't one of the true pleasures in life lying in bed at night while a breeze drifts in through an open window? Couldn't they have just left a few windows in each room uncaulked? Why let newer technologies be the ruination of certain older ones that, though outdated, still retain some usefulness? It seems like the two ought to have found a way to coexist. Right?

Well I found a cruel answer to that complaint in the attic, where I discovered that that a PVC drain pipe for the HVAC unit had been fed, rather violently, into our cast iron sewage pipe by some thoughtless technician years ago. He had to find a way to drain the condensation created by the unit, and so he took a hammer and chisel and punched a gigantic hole into the iron drain pipe and stuffed his little PVC thingie in there, and voila! No condensation! (Nevermind that giant hole.)

Something like this happened to Oklahoma City. The streetcars were ripped up and replaced by buses that didn't run on time; downtown residents fled to the suburbs; and even though the suburbs lacked the foot traffic of the old neighborhoods, retailers fled downtown when the winds of urban renewal ripped up Main Street to build a galleria mall that never got built. In the name of improvement, of progress, the city suffered one blow after the other--the city regressed--until Mayor Ron Norick drew the line in the sand and put together MAPS I to restore the lifeblood to our city. That was 20 years ago. And look at this! We've moved to an old neighborhood that's 8 blocks away from my new job. I walk to work (on the days it doesn't rain) and on my walk I pass beautiful old homes that are a testament to good design and smart neighborhood planning. I miss Boston, but I'm glad to be back.

Some photos from the past month:

A Bird's Eye View of Population Density and Sparsity

It's hard to see the forest for the trees. It's even harder to see the forest for the trees when the forest has been deforested. Translation: it's hard to see how dense or sparse a neighborhood is or has become when you are living in it. Sometimes you need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Or, in this case, you need to take a hundred steps up and look at the picture from above. This is where satellite imagery can help.

Inspired by Charles Benton's "kite aerial photography" (but not actually owning a kite), I explored Bing's maps page and discovered a cool feature: "Bird's Eye View" satellite imagery. Using this tool, I "Binged" nine of my previous addresses to see what they look like from the air. To me, the results reveal much about differing assumptions of how and where we ought to live, and how we ought to go about planning cities and neighborhoods.

Check them out. Two of these are in Cincinnati, three are in Oklahoma City, and four are in Boston. Can you tell which ones are which? The first reader to put all the right answers in a comment will win a free Oklachusetts sticker.

But also, I'm wondering if you agree with me that the most aesthetically pleasing neighborhoods from the air often have the sparsest populations on the ground (and if you read my last post, you'll remember how important I think it is to have densely populated neighborhoods). Some of these 'hoods look like they were designed mostly for the approval of plane passengers cruising overhead. One more thing: which of these places looks the most "family friendly"? What does this mean, anyway? Is it friendly to have to put your kid in a car seat whenever you want to go anywhere?

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