Bicycle Diaries

by David Byrne

  The city is pretty much bankrupt, especially after having built two incredible stadiums right next to one another. The voters said no to the stadium expenditures, but a revamped initiative snuck through, and now the bills have come due, and, as there was no increase in taxes to pay for them, the debts are devastating. The Republican legislature squashed any tax increases, especially in the wealthier suburbs, so other services have been cut instead of the stadiums: city pools were closed, the police force cut. The financial and tax burden has fallen on those, mostly poor, who still live in the city itself.

  Luckily some of the oligarchs—the Heinzes, the Mellons, and a few others—continue to live in the city and don’t want their town to go straight to hell, so they are working to reinvigorate the city center, block by block, inch by inch, and to figure out some means of obtaining funds from the wealthier property owners. The largest tenants in the city now, post-heavy industry, are schools and hospitals, which unfortunately don’t pay taxes, so something else has to be done to raise money. Money either has to be found or those institutions will have to close up shop. But John and others seem optimistic. John elaborates: “The city is not bankrupt just because of the stadiums. There are a lot of factors at work, such as the shrinking population. Like many other cities, this one lacks sufficient federal and state funding support. There are people working to turn places around in addition to the oligarchs—grassroots community groups and small businesses all over the place. The bakery we visited in Millvale is an example of a business locating itself in an old neighborhood, which helps bring life back to those areas.”

  Various disastrous urban renewal schemes of the 1960s and ’70s have yet to be undone. A beautiful freeway cuts the North Side in two, insulating the stadiums and all their attendant businesses from the local neighborhoods. John: “There are grassroots efforts being made to work on such matters as the North Side neighborhoods around the stadium. The renovated houses we saw on the North Side, around central North Side and the Mexican War streets, are worth a lot of money now.”

  Housing projects created high-crime zones. The neighborhoods that were deemed beyond help—that didn’t get that “gift” of urban renewal back in the day, the neighborhoods of immigrant worker housing scattered here and there—are the ones that are reviving now. Some of them look beautiful. They still have local bars, mom-and-pop stores, and pedestrian traffic. I saw the same thing happening in Milwaukee.

  After lunch we visit a church in Millvale that had been recommended as having interesting murals. Millvale is a few miles up the river, a former mining village nestled in one of those little valleys. Lots of boarded-up stores line the streets, but a great French bakery, as John mentioned, has courageously made a stand. I buy a cake, as it’s my birthday.

  The church in this little town is Croatian, and the murals, by Maxo Vanka, are spectacular. The Diego Rivera of Pittsburgh, I would say. The murals were done during eight weeks in 1937, and they cover the interior of the church. Of course there is one of the Virgin holding a child, but below her, for example, on either side of what is now the altar, are images of the Croatian people: on the left is a crowd of them from the old world, and on the right from the new; a steel foundry can be seen belching smoke behind this grouping.

  More unusual for a church are the political and antiwar aspects of the murals that echo the Crucifixion—widows mourn over a soldier in a coffin containing a bleeding corpse, and crosses cover the hillside behind them. Another wall depicts corrupt justice: a figure in a gas mask holds scales on which the gold outweighs bread. Clearly World War I had a big effect on Maxo.

  In one image the Virgin, on the verge of being bayoneted herself, separates two soldiers.

  In another mural an oligarch done up as Death reads the stock reports while being served a chicken dinner by two black servants. Finally, we see Jesus being stabbed by a bayonet, in a kind of second Crucifixion.

  Bold and brave stuff to confront the Sunday parishioners with. The murals are all badly in need of renovation—years of coal dust have darkened them. But one can hope that these amazing things will survive and be cleaned soon.

  On a more recent visit I ride around through the hills that are everywhere here except by the waterfront and that make cycling a challenge. I can see changes since my visit just four years earlier. It seems that Pittsburgh is more than just standing—the cultural district downtown is jumping on the weekend, the little neighborhoods are thriving with their corner bars and grocery stores, the strip district still has its booming markets and, I am told, folks are moving back into the city. This latter change is essential to turning a town around, as it will provide the tax base, and the humanity, that will enable this kick start that the Heinzes and others have initiated to keep things running on their own steam.

  Sometimes a rebirth can be started in one neighborhood and then it spreads to the surrounding areas—if they’re not cut off or isolated. Artists move into a former factory district and soon cafés and grocery stores follow. A music club opens, a gallery and a bookstore. Developers turn the warehouses into luxury condos and the process begins again, somewhere else. Or, as in some downtowns like Kansas City’s, a local impresario might decide to put shows in someplace like the Uptown Theater, a venue in a sketchy part of town that was on the verge of being torn down. A business opportunity and a show of faith. A bar opens close by, a record store, and before too long the area has begun to be more livable. One significant investment can sometimes trigger a chain of events. The Heinzes have done something like that in downtown Pittsburgh, renovating theaters and arts centers, which have attracted other businesses. It’s working.

  Though I have tended to paint a bleak picture, not every city in the U.S.A. is going to hell in a handbasket because of dying industry, stupid planning decisions, or racially motivated white flight. It doesn’t have to be that way. San Francisco, Portland, much of Seattle, much of Chicago, Minneapolis, Savannah, and many more are vibrant and full of life. These are places where things are turning around, where the quality of life has completely returned, or where it was never allowed to be destroyed. Strangely, the recent economic downturn might be a great opportunity. Sustainability, public transport, and bike lanes aren’t scoffed at anymore. Congressman Earl Blumenauer, a longtime advocate for biking as a means of public transportation, thinks now is the time.

  Some of these other cities I visited might come back too. Often it only takes some political will and one or two significant changes and then things begin to change by themselves. Cities as a rule use less energy per capita than do suburban communities where people are living spread out, so as the cost of energy spirals up, those grimy urban streets start to look like they might have possibilities. The economy has tanked, the United States can lose its place as number one world power, but that doesn’t mean that many of these cities can’t still become more livable. Life can still be good—not only good, it can be better than what most of us can imagine. A working-class neighborhood can be full of life. A neighborhood that has many different kinds of people and businesses in it is usually a good place to live. If there were some legislation that ensured that a mixed-use and mixed-income neighborhood would emerge when developers move in, it would be wise, because those are the liveliest and healthiest kinds of communities.

  Berlin

  Nostalgia for the Mud

  Flying into Tegel Airport in Berlin I look down at the neatly ordered fields and roads—even in the surrounding forests the trees are in neat rows—and I think to myself how this entire country, the landscape, everything as far as one can see, has been ordered. There is no wildness, chaos, or funkiness, not here or much of anywhere in industrialized Europe. Man is in charge and has, over many centuries, put nature in its place. In many countries there is an ethos that complements this gardener point of view—an ethos that values wildness. So as a result there are isolated parks and protected areas—like green zoos—here and there.

  I remember in 1988 scouting the German countryside f
or film locations for a movie called The Forest that the theater director Bob Wilson and I had hoped to make. At that time the Wall was still up, but I managed to scout locations in the East as well, which made the scouting job fun and challenging. Given the title of the piece, inevitably there were to be scenes in a virgin forest, so I went looking for one. In all of Germany we found one piece of virgin forest—a preserved one-kilometer-square roadside tract.

  It was indeed different, very different, from all the other forests we had seen. None of the trees were straight; they were gnarled, twisted, and had evidently led interesting lives. The forest floor was littered with massive dead and rotting trunks—twisted corpses, the ancestors of those giants still standing. It was just like the forests described in fairy tales or seen in certain movies—chaotic but almost comforting, creepy but beautifully alluring. One felt that one was inside of a creature and outside of it at the same time. As if one were walking around the innards of a huge being. A bit sad, I think, that my visual reference for an unmediated forest derives from images in fiction and movies. Sad too that the forest in this preserved area was once quite common, but now lives on mainly in our collective imaginations—an image burned into our psyches over millennia, indelible, but now having little relationship to the real world. This little parcel was the only one left—except for a rumored larger forest in Poland, but going there to shoot would have been impractical.

  Europe is manicured. The whole continent, except for some semi-accessible places in the Alps, northern Scotland, and Scan dinavia, has been groomed and tended by the hand of man. It’s a vast millennial project, this custodial effort, requiring the cooperation, over centuries, of scores of nations and peoples, all speaking different languages and with different cultures. The greatest physical human enterprise of all.

  America has nothing like it. There is no historically manicured landscape except maybe in the aptly named New England, or perhaps parts of the Great Plains, where the steppes of North America have been organized by agribusiness. America still has, lurking around its edges in tattered remnants, bits of unkempt wildness and danger. Even in places where that wildness is illusory it still exists within living memory, at least for now—people therefore internalize its existence and act as if it is still there, and behave accordingly. The seductive and dangerously chaotic and capricious unknown lies just beyond the farmland in many places—or is at least remembered as being there not so long ago.

  Europeans’ attitude toward their landscape is to cultivate the continent as if it were a vast garden, while Americans prefer to subdue the landscape by force, paving over vast areas, or planting miles of a single crop—like corn—that stretch to the horizon. In the New World it is assumed that there will always be more land over the horizon, so sustainable cultivation and conservation are often viewed as namby-pamby. I suppose a lot of Russia and the former Soviet republics are like this too, which might explain a thing or two. Maybe that’s why lots of North Americans feel that the whole world has to be tamed and brought under control while Europeans, having more or less achieved that control in their own lands, feel a duty to nurture and manage rather than simply subdue. Industrialization and agricultural subjugation throughout most of Europe is now a thing of the past—its legacy a nasty memory of polluted rivers and blackened skies, many of which are now being cleaned up, sort of.

  I ride my bike along the bike lanes here in Berlin and it all seems very civilized, pleasant, and enlightened. No cars park or drive in the bike lanes, and the cyclists don’t ride on the streets or on the sidewalks either. There are little stoplights just for the bikers, even turn signals! (Cyclists often get to turn a few seconds before the rest of the traffic, to allow them to get out of the way.) Needless to say, most cyclists here do stop for these lights. Pedestrians don’t wander into the bike lanes either! I’m kind of in shock—it all works so well. Why can’t it be like this where I live?

  Here even the bikes themselves are practical. They are usually black, with only a few gears, mudguards, and often a basket—something no sport cyclist would ever even dream of adding to a mountain bike in North America. In Holland they go even further, with special carts for kids and groceries and bike windshields (!) for your child. Granted, riding in the streets of New York City, with the recurring potholes, bumps, and yearly resur- facings, is closer to an extreme sport than riding is here, where somehow, despite the harsh winters, the streets are mostly smooth and obstacle free. Hmmm. The biggest bumps here are on the occasional cobblestone streets or bits of pavement. How do they do it? Or rather, how is it that the richest country in the world doesn’t seem to be able to do it?

  In making smooth streets some may say that the Germans have ironed out the psychological bumps in their daily lives. If the New York City streets are wilder and funkier (at least outside of “Mall Manhattan”), then these German streets are on Prozac—civilized but slightly less exciting. But should we in the United States be forced to ride on “exciting” streets?

  Modern northern European society is fairly homogenized. There are immigrants, but they still don’t make up a huge percentage of the population. There are also fewer economic differences and gulfs between the classes here than there are in the United States, except among those same immigrants—the Turkish in Germany, Indonesians in Holland, Africans in Belgium, and North Africans and Arabs in France. For the white folks, the locals, it is certainly a more egalitarian life than in the U.S.A., at least as far as social services are concerned. These same white folks are now aware that people from their former colonies now wonder why they also can’t get the free medical care and schools. Even if people can vote in a country, as they certainly can in most of the United States, if there are incredibly wide economic differences and inequalities in education and health care, then the majority’s interests and the public good cannot prevail. A minority’s will is trumping that of the majority. Then true equal representation doesn’t exist.

  I’ve been in Germany many times over the years. At first, in the late ’70s, Berlin seemed exotic and exciting, a cold war icon. I remember traveling the well-guarded corridor leading to Berlin from Hamburg—a kind of gauntlet through part of East Germany, it seemed to us then—and past Checkpoint Charlie, the U.S.-controlled gate in the Berlin Wall, with its associated tales and propaganda exhibits of desperate and failed escapes from the East. There was at the same time the degeneracy evidenced in the various punk clubs and discos in West Berlin. You always remembered that you were confined here, a prisoner on an island of luxury, culture, and pleasure—plopped inside the drab, serious, high-minded East. The city as a tease, a temptation. I imagine that made living there a little more exciting and a little crazier as well.

  For the walled city with no room to expand that it was in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s Berlin had a surprising number of parks and greenways. Being almost flat, it was, and still is, a perfect place for getting around on a bike, though the winters can be bitterly cold with the winds sweeping down from the north. It has a great film festival, which often features movies from the East and from countries not known in the West for their cinema. I once saw a wonderful Turkish film in which a respected theater director takes a quick job acting in a shampoo commercial, only to find himself stuck living in the imaginary world of the characters in the advertisement. His new family knows him only as the character in the ad, and they know what he does for a living, etc., but he, the actor, has no idea. After some initial befuddle ment, he gives in and attempts to adjust to his new life.

  Prisoner Number Seven

  When Rudolf Hess died—the last Nazi prisoner held in Spandau Prison—reportedly by strangling himself with an electrical cord, the whole building in that western suburb of the city was said to have been dismantled, brick by brick. The bricks were carted off in the night by the British, whose sector the prison was in, and then ground into powder and thrown into the sea—as if the prison, or even its bricks, might have attracted neo-Nazi sympathizers if left intact. Did they think t
he sympathizers believed some of Hess’s energy might have rubbed off on the bricks? Anyway, one day it was there and the next day it was gone; all that remained was a sandlot.

  For twenty years he was the only prisoner in the whole complex, “the loneliest man in the world” according to one book. What a beautiful image. Apparently he could wander more or less at will around the vast prison, but no one was allowed to touch him or to shake his hand. (Again, like the bricks, it seems it was assumed he possessed some magical Nazi touch juju.) He had famously flown to Scotland in 1941 in hopes of negotiating a peace deal. He parachuted onto a laird’s property south of Glasgow and was allegedly arrested by a man wielding a pitchfork.

  Trade-off

  I arrive in town from the airport. The taxi is slowly prowling around in the early morning looking for my destination, and it is gray and no one is about. But there, on the other side of the street, a man is walking in a bright red outfit; he is a round German dressed as an American Indian chief, feathers in his headdress, winter moccasins and all. He is all alone—the street is deserted. At first I think to myself, Oh, the nutters here are really inventive! but then I realize it’s Carnival week and he’s probably stumbling home after a long night. There is a whole Wild West phenomenon here sparked by the novelist Karl May. His series of popular Western novels features the Indians as the heroes.