NewGeography.com blogs

Last month, an old elevated train track on Manhattan's west side was re-opened to the public as a public park. The High Line was a 1.5-mile stretch of track constructed in the 1930s to carry freight trains. The last train ran on the platform in 1980 and the space has been the subject of battles ever since between park-minded preservationists and residents who wanted to tear down the steel monstrosity with no apparent function.

It is a great thing the preservationists won. The High Line is a magnificent and inspiring park, a one-of-a-kind public space with views of the Hudson River that shows a great respect for the industrial history of the surrounding uber-hip Meatpacking District. It manages to feel both modern and classic at once, with moveable wooden chez lounges that look like they could belong by the pool at a W Hotel sliding along the original tracks at places. Gardens are planted along the walkway and amidst the old tracks making it a perfect place to stroll, visit and view the west side of the city.

The first phase of the park runs from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street with the second phase slated to open next year extending all the way to 30th Street. The Promenade Plantee in Paris was the first elevated garden to be transformed into a public space but the bug is catching on and other projects are planned in St. Louis, Philadelphia, Jersey City and Chicago.

To get to the High Line, get off the subway at the 14th Street and 8th Avenue station and walk west towards the river. You will not be disappointed, even it rains like the day I visited.

Unemployment may be at 11.4% in LA County, pundits may mock the dysfunctional state budget system, but crime is still dropping from already historic lows in the City of Los Angeles.

According to statistics released by the LAPD yesterday, homicides are down a third compared to the first half of last year with violent crime down 6% and assaults down 8%.

It seems to be received wisdom - I'll call it pop criminology - that a spike in criminal activity always accompanies an economic crisis and a drop in employment. The recent movie "Public Enemies" milks this association most explicitly, and it may have been more true in the Depression. Overall, however, this is not the case in the U.S. these days and the numbers for property crime in LA also show a decrease: auto thefts fell 17% and property crime 7% overall compared to Jan. 1-June 30, 2008.

Obviously, the relationship between crime and economic hardship is more complex and requires critical thinking about a host of sociological factors to attempt to explain the causality of crime. But these numbers, and similar findings in other cities, should debunk the common assertion that economic downturns correlate with criminal resurgence.

The forthcoming book, "When Brute Force Fails" by UCLA Professor Mark Kleiman is an important contribution to the subject which I look forward to reading. It should be read by pop criminologists and criminologists alike.

For those of you who have incredible interest in the subject, the LA Times Homicide Blog is an interesting resource. Increasingly, strapped papers like the L.A. Times (which recently discontinued its California section, merging it into the main section) are putting content like this on-line.

In the past month, Washington D.C. has experienced both an increase in number of jobs as well as an increase in unemployment, according to the Washington Post.

The city’s unemployment rate rose from 9.9 in April to 10.7 percent in May – far surpassing the national average of 9.4 percent – despite gaining about 1,400 jobs primarily with the federal government.

The District is often considered to be immune to such job market fluctuations because of steady government employment. But as Alice Rivlin, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, points out, “[D.C.] has plenty of jobs, mostly high-skill jobs that require education beyond high school.”

The high-paid, higher-skill jobs created within the government are often times given to those not living in the city – Virginia’s unemployment rate: 7.1 percent, Maryland’s: 7.2 percent.

Job loss has also disproportionately affected the city’s African American population. The predominately white and affluent Ward 3 had an unemployment rate of 2.5 percent in April, far better than the largely poor and black Ward 8, where the rate was 23.3 percent.

To my friends and colleagues in the US, it must be easy for Americans, in these times, to think that no one elsewhere in the world thinks about the principle on which America was founded. But many of us do.

These Jacquie Lawson cards are created in England and you will see that she uses the 4th July cards to pass on some information to her subscribers. (She would be well aware that most Americans would be well aware of the contents of the Archives.) So when we say, "we are thinking of you" we mean that in both the personal and historical sense.

The Anglo American tradition lives on, and at times like this we remember that American history is also British history. Queen Elizabeth the First, James Watt, and Adam Smith are part of our common heritage.

View 4th of July ecard

One of the great migrations of Americans was from Dust Bowl Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression. People came from all over the parched plains to California; South Dakotans, Nebraskans, Oklahomans and others. But only one group had a name. No one called them Dakoties, nor Nebies, but they did call them “Okies.” Their legacy was spread by John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Indeed, so many came to California that it enacted an “anti-Okie” law, which was duly set aside by the United States Supreme Court (Edwards v. the People of California).

How things change. A Sacramento Bee article reports on the migration of Californians to, of all places Oklahoma and nearby states. For decades, Oklahoma has been the ultimate of “flyover country,” one of the last places people on the coast would think of moving to. Yet, as I pointed out in 2005, Oklahoma has become more competitive, at least partially because its advantages in housing costs and hassle free commuting. Moreover, it’s more than Californians. Seattle, which lost home-grown Boeing to Chicago some years ago, lost its NBA “Supersonics” to Oklahoma City last year. Having spent most of my life on the coast, I never would have imagined that Oklahoma City would become competitive with California and Seattle. But it has.