A death observed
Posted inPolitics: National

A death observed

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ObserverSite

Apparently, most Americans learned about the death spiral of metropolitan newspapers and the consequences from watching John Oliver. Then they went back to kitten videos on social media. None of this is new to readers of Rogue Columnist (see here and here). My aim today is more modest.

As Oliver's well-worth-watching segment was going viral, a few of us were following the demolition of the Charlotte Observer building in downtown (or as the boosters insist ahistorically, Uptown) Charlotte. The photo above shows the work about half done a few weeks ago. The building, which took up a city block, was once as substantial on the Tryon Street side (left) as it remained on the Stonewall Street side in the top photo. Below is the site as of August 29th — all gone.

During my 30 years (!) in the working press, I have been employed by 10 newspapers across the country. I never made it to the New York Times, but I was fortunate to work at some of the finest metro papers in America, among some of the best journalists. The Knight Ridder-owned Observer was one. It was here that I was able to hit my zenith of business-section turnarounds — and the credit goes to my gifted colleagues, I only pointed the way. If I live long enough, I'll tell some of the stories. Unlike the Rocky Mountain News, the Observer is still going, in much more modest leased space (the name isn't even on the building).

But today I mostly want to meditate on the building and its meaning. This classic piece of Knight Ridder hulking architecture was no beauty. But it symbolized the importance and power of the newspaper, which not only committed great journalism but was a large employer. Before the collapse, the typical metro daily could employ 1,500 people or more in real jobs, not "gigs," in a multitude of departments from advertising and dispatch to platemaking and the press room. In the lobby, through large windows, you could watch the massive presses run. From college graduates and creative bohemians to skilled blue-collar workers and high-school dropouts — a major newspaper offered secure work and paths up.

If you had paid your dues at little papers, if you earned a reporting or editing job at a well-respected metro, you knew you had arrived and had much proving to do in order to remain — the imposing building alone told you. The building housed not only a newsroom, but a sizeable manufacturing, advertising, marketing, and distribution center. At one time, trucks from here took bundles of the Charlotte Observer to places across the Carolinas every night. It was a major civic institution — Observer Publisher Rolfe Neill was one of the four or five titans who turned Charlotte from a middling Southern big town into a major metropolis of national consequence, and who revived downtown.

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Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix

The city in mind

As a native Westerner, my problem with "wide open spaces" is how many we've lost in my lifetime and how difficult it is to really live in what's left in a nation of 308 million. The constant move outward in metro Phoenix obliterates anything but the illusion. Today's wide vista out the window will be a Super Wal-Mart tomorrow. People who bought in Fountain Hills years ago — a development that annihilated one of the state's most lush saguaro forests, and it takes a saguaro ten years to grow an inch-and-a-half — are now partly surrounded by schlock. Same with Verrado, where the idiot David Brooks saw "the future." Prescott, a town with history and wonderful bones, is a planning and congestion disaster outside the old town. The same is true with Flagstaff, as with most small towns in America.

If you're rich and lucky enough to buy land adjacent to a National Park, maybe your panorama will have the illusion of the pristine, although we know the pollution, fire, sleazy land swaps and other stresses facing our public lands — and just wait for the GOP to privatize it. Move to the staked plains and you can find real emptiness, but good luck finding work. And if I want wide open spaces, do I profane them further with a new house, which by its very nature can't be "green," and total dependence on the automobile? Good luck finding a real, scalable, sustainable small town on a passenger train route.

For these reasons, as well as growing up in central Phoenix and for the eye-opening years I spent living in real cities, I choose to make my stand in the city. And it's a major focus of this blog. Most Americans don't "get" cities; they don't have urban values. Most want their imitation English country estates crowded together as lookalike tract houses in suburbia. The problems with this are manifold. First, the nation's population has doubled since Levittowns were first laid down. Thus, most suburbs suffer from urban problems without urban solutions. Second, they are artifacts of a moment in history defined by cheap gasoline, now passing away. Third, sprawl destroys vast tracts of valuable agricultural land, rural areas and wilderness, with numerous environmental strains. Fourth, for all the heavy subsidies to make suburbia work (freeways, flood control, etc.), it's a highly inefficient spatial arrangement. Suburbia is not merely boring and filled with anomie (American Beauty, etc.), it is now the epicenter of the housing crash, with attendant debt, poverty and very high carrying costs.

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Posted inUncategorized

Add cities to the list of victims of the Great Disruption

Some of America’s most prosperous cities are also among the casualties of what I’m calling the first stage of The Great Disruption — the current financial crisis.

Charlotte, a middling Southern town built into a city by two money center banks, will see its world changed radically whether Wachovia is bought by Wells Fargo or Citigroup. At least one-fifth of its jobs are in banking, and these are high-paid corporate jobs with benefits. Virtually every advance in Charlotte, particularly its revived downtown, came from the leadership of Wachovia and Bank of America. Now half of that will be gone, and the claim to being America’s second-largest banking center.

I make a prediction: Bank of America will soon move its headquarters to New York. The decision will likely be camouflaged in language of "dual headquarters" or some such corporate claptrap. But BofA’s best and brightest will feel an increasing need to be in what’s left of America’s financial capital. After all, the men who built these powerhouses as a powerful, personal gift to Charlotte are retired.

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Posted inUncategorized

Charlotte faces its moment of truth

Around 1996, when I was the business editor of the Charlotte Observer, I provoked the ire of the president of the chamber of commerce — as I so often do with such caudillos — by pointing out an inconvenient truth: the city’s economy was too dependent on two big banks. Charlotte was in the middle of a historic boom that turned a sleepy, mid-sized Southern city into the nation’s second-largest banking center.

An Oz-like skyline shoots up dramatically from the flat treeline of the Carolina Piedmont. Signs of fabulous wealth are everywhere, from the expensive cars on the street to the beautiful people shopping at Dean & Deluca. It’s an amazing testmony to what money can do — to what being positioned at the heart of the capital markets can do. And it’s mostly because of the two money center banks, what are now Bank of America and Wachovia, that are improbably headquartered there.

Then came the subprime and credit crises, partly authored by the smartest people in the room in Charlotte. Now, as the Wall Street Journal put it, "Charlotte is fretting over whether it can remain the last great U.S. banking center outside of New York." It should be fretting over more than that.

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Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Class, power and downtown development

Back when I was a college right-winger (and in those days we were few and had no pretty girls), I wrote fierce papers demonstrating the murderous fraud that was Karl Marx. A professor gently cautioned me that even if I disagreed with Marx, he offered another way of "seeing through history." He was right, of course. Marx's ideas led to some of the most bloody deeds in history. But his emphasis on class (and this was not original to him) is indeed useful.

I think about this as I watch downtown revivals and their failures. A city such as Seattle preserved most of its core buildings, many businesses and the downtown evolved organically and with all sorts of people. Phoenix and Charlotte, on the other hand, clear-cut most of their downtowns and started from scratch. If you arrived in Phoenix after 1980, you'd think the downtown was always vacant lots, government buildings and a few towers. Of course, Phoenix had a thriving downtown into the 1960s. Charlotte was similar.

Their results have been vastly different. But the class and power undertones are unmistakable and they have shaped the fate of each downtown and city.

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