how i got into this field and why i love what i do
Note: There is nothing more boring than a saccharin retelling of one’s “idyllic youth.” My youth was far from idyllic, rather this narrative is designed to recount how I came to love place, downtowns, cities, small towns, and community.
When I was a child, I lived for a period in the lovely burgh of Lindenhurst on the South Shore of New York’s Long Island. It was a predominantly blue-collar bedroom community home to many former New York City residents who sought a house, plot of grass, and a neighborhood school. I am not sure those times were any more innocent that our current technology-laden reality, but they were different. We did things one does not see as frequently today. I walked to school and played stickball in the street for hours during the summer and felt safe exploring the streets of the village sans chaperone. My trips to downtown Lindenhurst are what I remember best. I would bicycle downtown and explore this small but lively central village. It was a small downtown to be sure, but there was abundant activity.
I would stop for Italian ice, visit one of the two downtown grocery stores, buy some Fizzies (for those under 55, these were a cross between Alka Seltzer and Kool-Aid), and go to the pet store and stare at a gibbon named Morty who never seemed to find a home. Morty would sit in the pet shop and extend a coarse and odorous hand to patrons. I purchased cheap toys at a variety store, read boxing magazines at the newsstand abutting the railroad station, and would watch the commuter trains whiz by on their way to and from New York City.
I laugh now when I think of the number of times I procured a Yoohoo with twenty-five pennies, absent complaint from the shop owner at a little bodega called George’s. The downtown housed a small museum with a signed Babe Ruth baseball, and I would stare at the ball until the museum manager would clear her throat twice, signaling that it was time for me to move on. The pet store owner never cleared his throat when I stared at Morty. As far as that goes, Morty never cleared his throat, either.
I can still feel the gritty sawdust under my feet at the downtown meat market, the smells of the grocery store, and the sweet but tangy aroma of tobacco at the newsstand. The malodorous confines of the pet store — need I say more — are hard to forget — but heck, Morty had to go somewhere. The downtown library became almost a daily adventure and cemented forever my love affair with public libraries. Thank you, Andrew Carnegie.
I would bike home the “long way,” passing women carrying brightly wrapped packages and men smoking cigars in front of some undefined club. On the days when I would make a meager savings account deposit at the downtown bank, I felt most mature and was enthralled by the marble columns, the architectural details, and what seemed like a hundred-foot ceiling. The clicking of heels on the floor and the reverberation of officious voices led me to believe big things were happening behind the teller’s counters and at the desks spread about the lobby. The bikeable downtown was an engaging place for me animated by a host of activities and services and it was right in my backyard.
We lived a quick train ride from Manhattan, and my parents implored my siblings and me to take full advantage of the city’s profusion of cultural offerings: the museums, the symphony (what child could resist Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts that climaxed with the William Tell Overture?), Met’s games, the circus; the Statue of Liberty, Macy’s, Times Square, The Empire State Building, the Staten Island Ferry, automats, and the UN. We visited them all, including the outer boroughs. My father insisted I visit Chinatown, but it was really the Bowery that he wanted me to see, as a witness to the utter despair of men and women trapped, not just in poverty, but abject poverty. I now had two urban playmates. The smaller one a bike ride from home, and the other wild and bawdy one a train ride away.
Then a fateful day arrived. My father returned from work a bit more harried than usual. He announced that we were moving from Long Island to a suburb of Albany, New York called Delmar. I was confused. Where was this outpost to which I was now relegated? We moved in November of my tenth year and I was despondent.
In this new town, I experienced the “trauma” that so many youngsters encounter when faced with an array of new teachers and classmates. Although I was able to walk to school, I was missing a sense of place. Perhaps most challenging for me was that the metro Albany area (known as the Capital District) only had three televisions stations as compared to the eight or nine we had on Long Island.
No more New York City News and even worse, no Mets or Yankees games.
I longed for the lively downtown left behind in Lindenhurst. However, I eventually discovered something engaging just around the corner from our new home. A small commercial district known as the “Four Corners” by locals. I am guessing that moniker is rooted in the fact that intersecting streets created four corners (nothing gets by me!).
This newly discovered business district had a meat market that seemed to have more soda, canned goods, and candy than meat. I paid little attention to the blood-stained butcher — I was more interested in the confectioneries that dotted the counter. This owner of this store was not buying my twenty-five pennies for a Yoohoo act — oh well. Then I found a newsstand chock full of sports magazines, comic books, candy (and perhaps some magazines that my 10-year-old eyes should not have seen). The newsstand had that tobacco-rich smell that I remembered from Lindenhurst. There was life here after all and a sense of place, a sense of being somewhere.
Soon I discovered a pizza parlor, three barbershops (not exactly a growth business in the late 60’s — no pun intended), a luncheonette, and two hardware stores. There was a shoe store, a convenience food market, a clothing store, and a smattering of service businesses. Not long after, a bookstore — yes, a bookstore — opened in the commercial district. All this just a couple of blocks from home. I soon made friends and we played sports at the nearby school and biked to the Four Corners for after-game treats. The Four Corners also became a nice respite from the malls rapidly springing up in the Capital District.
The school system was consistently ranked one of the best in the state and I was delighted by the commitment of the teachers and students at the middle and high schools. There was something that became painfully obvious to me after a fashion. We were a lily-white community. There was little racial or ethnic diversity. In fact, I think there were only two Black members of my graduating class of 400. That lack of diversity became increasingly uncomfortable and it was disconcerting, especially when placed against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement nationally. My parents, on our visits to New York City, when living on Long Island, would take me to Harlem and talk about the Harlem Renaissance. My father would take me to baseball games and explain the importance of integration in sports. My father introduced me to books such as Black Like Me and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. They were sensitive to the need for diversity — but frankly, missed the boat with respect to their choice of a school district for me.
I began to take the commuter bus into Albany with some regularity where it was nice to immerse myself in a more diverse environment. There were people of color, “hippies” and people who were active in a variety of social causes — including the Black Panthers. At a young age, I became active in local politics and community organizing, thanks to what I was learning in downtown Albany. Albany, the State Capital, was populated with plenty of folks from New York City up for the legislative sessions. Often the downtown streets seemed a bit like a “mini-Manhattan” with downstate accents lingering in the air of Albany streets like so many cups of “cawfee.” I was not naïve, I understood that Albany was not New York City, but rather a small city with plenty to explore. That lesson has stayed with me — every place has something compelling to offer.
The City itself was run by a political machine that had been in power for decades. Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Kennedy, an Albany native, even penned a book about this political operation run by rapscallions. I was fascinated by the political comings and goings and by the power yielded by the Mayor, Erastus Corning, who had served for nearly 40 years. I had read “The Last Hurrah” and “All the King’s Men” and tried to tether the romance of these books larded with political misdeeds to the political machine in Albany. More chicanery than romance in Albany. Unsurprisingly it was a poorly managed city as political machines tend to incubate mismanagement and hatch larceny. Nowhere was the maladministration more evident than in Mayor’s urban renewal plans. These schemes were rooted in redlining, substandard urban planning, racism, and audacious cronyism.
Although I wasn’t spending my high school years pondering issues around urban planning and land use, I was developing some nascent views about cities, towns, and place. My thinking about urban space, although I would not have recognized it as such, was slowly emerging. My perspective was informed over frequent land-use fights between Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the Mayor that appeared with some frequency in our local newspapers. It distilled to this; Two old white patricians angling for control and the City suffering as a result.
Then-Governor, Nelson Rockefeller, unveiled ambitious plans for a downtown Albany project known as the Empire State Plaza. This mega-development called for a series of high-rise buildings, a performing arts center, the State Museum, reflecting pools, and a series of underground walkways as a buffer against the long and blustery Albany winters. The architecture is decidedly modern in keeping with Rockerfellian taste and was and still is, controversial in architectural and urban planning circles as it sits in contrast to the Romanesque Revival of The Capitol it abuts. Governor Rockefeller amassed political capital and was used to getting his way, hence the frequent head butting with Robert Moses (but that is a story for another day). The residents of Albany accepted the reality that at long last the Governor was taking an interest in the built environment of the Capital City and polls indicated residents found it acceptable.
What was not acceptable to many, including the Mayor, was that a thriving neighborhood would be razed in order to fulfill Rockefeller’s vision. I could see the towers of the mega-development rise from my suburban bedroom window. What I could not see were the homes and lives that were destroyed in the process. Acres of thriving businesses, homes, churches, and social gathering places were decimated in order to make this project a reality. Today, no urban planner in their right mind would call for a redevelopment project of that size and scope.
When I learned about the destruction of the neighborhood, I commenced an internal debate about the soundness of the Empire State Plaza(then referred to as the South Mall or Maul by locals) as the urban revitalization panacea offered by Rockefeller. Mayor Corning, also a man of great means, locked horns with Rockefeller, his fellow high-born pol over the destruction of the numerous city blocks. The Mayor’s concern was moored to politics — he hated to lose reliable machine voters and there were plenty in the neighborhood that was destroyed. In the end, Rockefeller and his downstate swells won that skirmish. Today that mega-development is known as The Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza. Mayor Corning has one of the towers named for him. Match, point, game Rockefeller.
What cemented my relationship with Albany and urbanism was a job at an inner-city chain grocery store called Grand Union. The store served what we would now call a “transitional neighborhood.” Working-class people lived there, almost all of them Black. There also was a Grand Union in my all-white suburb and several of my friends worked there. When I approached my father about taking a job at Grand Union he said, “Great. But not the one here in Delmar. The one in Albany would be a better fit.” He wanted me to experience some diversity. Perhaps it was the guilt of having moved us to a lily-white suburb. He did the right thing by pushing me into taking that job in an unfamiliar and racially diverse environment
The clientele was predominantly people of color and the staff entirely Black. I literally loved that store — and I know what literally means. In many ways, it was the best job I ever had. I was the only white employee for my first two years at Grand Union. My fellow stock boys (as we were called) and I became fast friends and soon we were socializing.
I fondly remember regularly having Saturday lunch at the home of one of my fellow employees, Jerry. We would eat burgers and watch Soul Train. He and I still joke about that forty years later. It was a good call on my father’s part. The other employees gave me the name “Wepner” because Muhammad Ali and other Black boxers would tune-up on a white fighter by the name of Chuck Wepner. The only thing I shared with Chuck Wepner was a first name. I am still known as Wepner to all of those guys. I was quick to email them all when a movie about Chuck Wepner entitled CHUCK was released a few years ago.
The neighborhood was rough around the edges and suffered from urban renewal-induced blight. It was a high crime neighborhood (I was held up at gunpoint twice), but the architecture on the main boulevard was superb and it dripped with authenticity and diversity. It differed from the Four Corners in my suburban silo.
There were several surviving old-time establishments on the main commercial corridor, and on my breaks, I would walk the boulevard and visit record stores, bakeries, newsstands, and even a drug store with a soda fountain (where I later worked for two weeks, until I learned that the owner paid less than minimum wage). It was thriving and walkable and I reveled in its genuineness and small-city urbanism.
At this juncture, I knew that urbanism was in my future although I certainly would not have called it that. The college I attended in Albany was a small liberal arts college nestled in an urban Albany neighborhood. The neighborhood was populated by two and three-decker flats with small lawns and tiny setbacks. From my small campus, my friends and I walked to the grocery store, the movies, the bookstore, restaurants, and other amenities (a euphemism for bars). It was Smart Growth before the phrase Smart Growth was hatched. When I landed a fellowship in the New York State Governor’s Office, I began to hear for the first time about complex land use issues and I was fascinated by the sheer number of state and local entities involved in revitalizing or damaging a city. Of course, the grossly ill-matched Empire State Plaza perched next door to the Capitol was a daily reminder of poor urban planning.
On the weekends, with friends, I would visit my old pal, New York City. I felt at home in New York and thirstily drank in its grittiness coupled with urbanity. But, like all friends he had changed with age. It was the era of Studio 54, subway crime, Son of Sam, and the ’77 blackout where I sat in Shea Stadium looking at a surreally-shadowed New York. Years later, of course, my pal would get a facelift, some therapy, and appear again as he once was. Until 2001 — but he survived that, too. Most recently he survived a global pandemic.
After graduation from college, and before grad school, I worked for CVS, the national health and beauty aid chain, and was fast-tracked into their real estate program designed to train site selectors for new stores. It meant I had to work a year in a store in order to be inculcated into the culture. I was lucky enough to run a neighborhood store in Albany. I was dismayed when CVS bought two independent pharmacies in the neighborhood and razed two historic buildings. I knew this was not for me. I wanted to save neighborhoods, not destroy them.
I attended graduate school at the S.I. Newhouse School at Syracuse University and studied public relations and journalism. As luck would have it, the only internship available was with a historic preservation agency. I steeped myself in the language of historic preservation and worked with staff to save historic structures, locate like-minded developers, and generate positive publicity for soon-to-be destroyed buildings. My love affair with cities continued, but now I was part of the action and could not have been happier. However, journalism and public relations were not a great entrée to urban revitalization.
Upon graduation, rather than take a job on Madison Avenue, I took one on Merrimack Street in the rapidly revitalizing, hardscrabble, mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts. I was the Main Street Manager. On the day of my interview, I walked the main street in Lowell, and it felt very much like the downtown Lindenhurst of my youth. The only thing missing was Morty the gibbon. I wonder whatever happened to Morty?
I went on to run downtown revitalization agencies in many cities and eventually opened my own consulting practices. As corny as it sounds, I get as excited by cities and downtowns today as the day of my first bike ride around downtown Lindenhurst and I have consulted in literally hundreds of them.