Killing our cities

Meant to touch on this yesterday, but got caught up in the latest Atlanta Braves post-season tragedy played out over an excruciating six hours and 18 innings. That was followed by the intense, crisply played Angels/Yankees game in which Shawn Chacon's fine pitching almost matched Lackey's, and was enhanced by the sudden appearance for the Yankees of the elusive effective LOOGY (Lefty to face Only One Guy), Al Leiter ("No!" roared the crowd when Torre came out to remove Chacon), and saved by two innings of vintage Mariano.

So I was a little distracted yesterday.

In any case, Nicolai Ourousoff has a poingnant column in yesterday's Times on the sad neglect that led to the submersion of New Orleans. In it, he sees a warning for all of our once great cities, whose infrastructures have been neglected pretty much since the death of FDR.

The pumps at Station No. 1 are arranged in a neat row, their suction pipes reaching down under the building to connect to the city's vast network of drainage canals. The 12-foot 1913 pumps, designed by the engineer Albert Baldwin Wood, are still here, as are four more he designed in 1928. The last two, the biggest and most powerful, were built in the mid-90's.

The night of the storm, Mr. Martin said, "the two new pumps went out right away. They're the most powerful. They sound like freight trains. Four of the old ones kept going all night. The original two pumps, those are the most reliable. I'd use those two before I'd use any of the others."

He walked to the back of the shed, where two towering wood doors are held in place by heavy braces. As the storm picked up speed that night, 100-mile-per-hour winds pounded the doors, threatening to tear them from their frames. If the storm waters flowed past them, he knew, the station would stop functioning. So he threw himself against the doors, struggling to hold them back while screaming for help over the roar of the machines. The other men came running to help, jamming the wood braces between the doors and the machines. That night, the pump stations kept the city from flooding.

Once the levees broke the next day, though, the battle was lost, and the operators had to shut the pumps down. Despite promises that the Coast Guard was on the way, the men in the flooded station spent much of the next day trying to flag down the helicopters flying overhead.

Eventually, the men were rescued by a supervisor in a motorboat. Two weeks after the hurricane, Mr. Martin was back at Pump Station No. 1. With his home destroyed, he was sleeping nights on a cot behind one of the pump's big metal control panels while his wife stayed with family in Mississippi. "There's nothing much left," he said. "I don't want to tell her about it."

The pump operator's story reflects a spirit of civic responsibility that rallied in humble quarters like these when Hurricane Katrina roared through the Gulf Coast, soon to be followed by Hurricane Rita. At the same time, it illustrates the degree to which the once-solid foundations of that system have become an illusion. For decades now, we have been witnessing the slow, ruthless dismantling of the nation's urban infrastructure. The crumbling levees in New Orleans are only the most conspicuous evidence of this decline: it's evident everywhere, from Amtrak's aging track system to New York's decaying public school buildings.

Rather than confront the causes of that deterioration, we are encouraged to overlook it, lost in a cloud of tourist distractions like casinos, convention centers, spruced-up historic quarters and festival marketplaces.

The inadequacy of that vision has now become glaringly obvious. And the problem cannot simply be repaired with reinforcement bars or dabs of cement. Instead, our decision makers will have to face up to what our cities have become, and why.

The great American cities of the early 20th century were built on the vision of its engineers, not just architects. That spirit can be found in the aqueduct that William Mulholland built in the 1910's, transforming the parched Los Angeles desert into a sprawling urban oasis. And it paved the way for the soaring skylines of Chicago and Manhattan architects.

In New Orleans, that vision was embodied not by the ornate facades of the French Quarter but by elaborate networks of pump stations, levees and drainage canals that transformed a quiet 19th-century town into a modern metropolis - one of the great engineering accomplishments of the 20th century.

Among its most beautiful legacies is the five-mile-long stepped seawall that frames the southern edge of Lake Pontchartrain. Completed by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930's, it allowed a derelict landscape of fishing sheds to give way to an elegant public park and the wealthy nearby enclave of Lakeview.

To Europeans, such engineering feats suggested the unflinching confidence at the core of a rising American democracy. And they laid the foundation for the image of the Modernist city that would endure into the 1970's: the city as a vast churning machine, an emblem of a society pointed firmly toward the future.

A vestige of that optimism can be found, in symbolic form, in the New Orleans Superdome, built in 1975. Conceived on a heroic scale, its menacing gray shell, atop a vast concrete plinth, was set at eye level with the surrounding freeways, as if it were an extension of the city's infrastructure grid.

By then, the great era of public works projects was essentially over, and the Army Corps of Engineers, once an emblem of America's technological prowess, was soon reduced to patching up ancient projects with fewer and fewer resources. We have repeatedly been reminded in recent weeks of how Congress rejected a proposal in the late 1990's to shore up the city's levees and wetlands. And the crisis only deepened later as the government continued to reduce the corps's budget.

This represents more than a loss of nerve. It is an outgrowth of the campaign against "big government" that helped propel Ronald Reagan to the presidency 25 years ago. And it was fueled by uglier motives, including a latent fear of cities, a myth of the city as a breeding ground for immorality.

Eventually, those fears prompted cities to transfer chunks of the public sector to developers - through the creation of the public-private partnerships that have come to define the contemporary city. The results of that Faustian bargain are well documented, in particular the transformation of affluent urban neighborhoods into self-sufficient enclaves while other communities, dependent on faltering city services, were allowed to decay.

I remember growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area when they were building the BART system. It was proposed to extend the system south along the peninsula to San Jose, but voters gave that a big thumbs down, based on the strange logic that it would be superfluous since the even then insufficient commuter train line already carried passengers from San Francisco to San Jose. Those were the same voters who approved Proposition 13. Now, their children and grandchildren sit idling on the crumbling Hwy 101, wondering why they just can't take a speedy train to their jobs in Silicon Valley.

Back East, you still can't take a subway directly to either of New York City's two airports. And the wonderous speed of the Acela train is kneecapped by aging tracks along the Boston - Washington DC corridor.

As long as policy makers live primarily in suburbia and cater almost exclusively to the suburban and, increasingly, exurban populations, the symbols of American progress (great skyscrapers, mass transit moving millions in and out of vibrant metropoli, etc.) will be replaced by five lane highways to nowhere, the strip mall, the cul de sac.