The Laird of the Grange

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/504120/how-alexander-hamiltons-house-got-moved

A fascinating article on saving Alexander Hamilton’s house in Harlem in 2008.

Soon after it re-opened on its new site, we got a chance to visit the Grange at St. Nicholas Park, just around the corner from the original site. It was cold but sunny; breezey. The world economy had collapsed in the fall; and Pres. Obama had been elected and inaugurated. Nevertheless many of the exhibits were actually proud GOP press releases and even a standee of Pres. Bush, with framed letters thanking all the Wall Street banks and financiers who donated, and others from all the already-disgraced Wall Street banksters who bragged of selling their puppies for dimes to contribute. And all thanks to the generosity of all the Republican officers of state, including Pres. Bush and Mayor Giuliani and the Bloomberg and even little Timmy Geithner, the Boy Whiz Secretary, who got all the inefficient big-government red tape cut to preserve this shrine.

I was dumfounert. Here were Republicans and Republican funders, whom I had heard for years trashing history and cutting preservation budgets and closing parks and tearing down historic sites right and left, whistle and it’s gone, sell ’em off if they can’t pay their own way. Now, they were cheering themselves hoarse for getting the government to move its ass and preserve this particular Federalist gem as a shrine. (The View is all in favor of Federalism, in shrines, houses, or countries, I shouldn’t have to say.) But, it was all part of a well-funded, including by the Heritage Foundation and the Koch Brothers and other right-wing types, Hamilton renaissance — a general Hamilton moment, which included several new biographies, including Ron Chernow’s, and several big seminars to examine Hamilton’s Legacy, and it was a big shot in the arm for the Original Construction legal movement, which “Hamiltonian” judges are now being appointed en masse.

None of this is a conspiracy theory, but a fact, which was well-publicized at the time. There was even talk of re-designing the currency to make Hamilton even more popular and prominent among the Founding Fathers. (Hint: what if we removed Washington from the 1 dollar bill, and replaced him with You Know Who? Not enough poor people ever get to look at a tenner, was the logic.)

Anyway, I was only a little surprised a few years later, right at the end of Pres. Obama’s administration, which had given away untold trillions to the banks and locked up nary a bankster, when there appeared a Hamilton musical. Of course I was excited, and puzzled, but jangled and jazzed, by the cast album when the Albalas introduced me to it. I was swept up on whatever glittering lyrics I could catch, and bopped to the relentless enfilade of beats. But again, I was dumfounert — and remain so, at the public mania, except to understand that people love money like God, and God must have invented money so God must be Alexander Hamilton, and worshiping him, he will grant me more wealth. Most people just stare at me when I ask (so I ask the breeze): isn’t it ironic that a project hyped to get impoverished immigrant kids into the theater — and into the theatre — was about the guy who officially nailed down forever and all time that America would be a brutal class-layered high-immigration, low-wage industrial exploitation society? Isn’t it funny that this show was, moreover, offering tickets starting at 1,600 bucks the pair; with a few lucky free lottery winners at every performance to swell sales further? No dude, they’d say, waving their metaphoric hands in my proverbial face, you don’t get it, it’s about Alexander Hamilton! I know I know…how he got his shot, and stayed in school, and learned the ways of the rich and beat them in cleverness and started with nothing and got to live in a great big fine house, all of which admirable things, yes, of course, he certainly did do, thank you, Mr. Giuliani.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/hamilton-and-minstrel-show-remix

Today I came across this essay on Black Agenda Report, and you would be edified to click. The writer takes an angle on the black-and-brown casting, rather than on the fudged debt-money-finance angle, but it is a similar critique. Anyway it’s not a review, but it’s the best piece on the show Hamilton, that I’ve seen.

Dear Sir David, Teacher, Uncle, Friend, Baby, It’s Not About Money

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THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT.

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/518945-david-attenborough-calls-for-global-500-billion-a-year-investment

“And you know, Ma’am, anybody getting in on the ground floor of this thing could make a killing.”

The brilliant biologist and TV star is a direct inspiration to me. Saving the wild lands we have left is the only cause I have left, and that has taken a beating this year. But Sir David has been criticized before for failing to use his plummy pulpit to make a stand, or educate the public about the imminence and permanence of total ecological destruction, and our failures to stop it. He has recently responded, and to his credit has stirred himself admirably, issuing public warnings.

Consider then, how painful, but necessary, it is to criticize him again. This brilliant man deserves better than to end his career as a shill for disaster capitalism, a useful idiot, a coddled/addled TV star pitchman, or maybe hedge fund grifter — how about sincerely befuddled do-gooder, who has been trained to talk by the PBS (BBC) fundraisers.

The point is to resume our laypersons’ discussion of Hamiltonian finance (the American system) versus Modern Monetary Theory. Which you and I, Patient Reader, get to work out as much as anyone on Earth, so here goes the critique:

Only a fool would turn to Wall Street to save nature.

Whatever one’s individual understanding of money has been, from “why ain’t I got none?” to “a penny saved is a penny earned” to “time to make the donuts” to “my portfolio is perfectly balanced,” it’s important, as a citizen if not for yourself, to realize that it doesn’t work like that anymore. Everything any one of us has tried to believe about money and finances and taxes and work and success, is now garbage. The President of the United States, the famous billionaire who runs the show, has no money and doesn’t pay his taxes and has wrecked our economy in a way that more money can’t help. That isn’t stopping Trump from deluging the banks of the world with $Bucks$. The Trump-appointed chimp at the Federal Reserve, Mr. Powell, is printing money to speculate on Wall Street stocks, pumping it out by the hour to cover losses on the downside so it can keep inflating the upside. (The terrifying idea of inflation — to tame which Central Banks were formed — and which we have been trained all of our lives to see as Satan — is now finally revealed to be totally meaningless, a trick to gull the rubes, a bug-bear or hobgoblin left over from J.P. Morgan’s gold-hoarding view of the world. Also inflation’s deadly eternal “other shoe,” austerity, that lie that civic budgets must be pinch-penny managed and starved of funds, cutting even the few workers on public payrolls, to keep money “freed up” for “the economy” at a time of crisis. Both should have been chucked out with the gold standard.)

So, for money at all, all bets are off, and anyone including me who says he’s an expert is a liar, and next stop Cloudcuckooland. Still, Patient Reader, these imaginary digital trillions don’t just fly up into the ether and won’t be accounted away, not without Bernie Sanders. Phantom wealth must run to ground; it must yield returns downtown to be exchanged for hookers and blow in mid-town, and pay for the townhouse up-town. Thus there must be ever-soaring rents, more privatization of public services, more catastrophically rising health care costs, more militarized world police, ever-higher college tuition even though nobody is there, more barren acres of sprawl, and more carbon consumed, consumed, consumed. Why would Sir David want all that?

Fallacy of The Organic Theory of Money: Sir David, a naturalist, naturally believes there is a crisis, and with money always so terribly scarce, and now especially, he is calling out the people, through their parliaments assembled, to rummage in their cupboards for old silver clippings, and put up special taxes and levies throughout the lands, and dig out those shavings of precious coin. In other words voted over by their Parliaments, by putting it in as a line-item in their always-stressed budgets, thus guaranteeing, or “backing” the creation of that money. By each putting up just a few silver coins each, each year, only a widow’s mite to some but all for the cause, eh? it could be Invested, he says into a special fund, all handled by the flash boys on Wall Street, which means it will breed returns; and the Fund will be sold to the public to attract new funds; and maybe need to be balanced with hedged securities. But anyway a giant treasure chest, like a bank, where the money created will keep earning compound interest forever and be able to spin off new funds to be circulated into the economy in ways that…save wild lands, whatever those are.

The fallacy is, the power of that money will be multiplied for the Wall Street boys, many times over; 10 times, at least, if they’re not cheating. All the imminent and permanent destruction of the world is being caused by the floods of money misapplied by feckless corporations and authoritarian despots. Wall Street will take Sir David’s Fund and use it to finance oil wells and prison labor camps and skyscrapers in Dubai. Sir David’s tiny pittance of 500 billion florins per year, government backed and soundly invested, will let the goons call their buddies at the Fed for 5 trillion more free ducats to buy up land and water systems and raise everybody’s rent by tearing down downtown to build more empty condos.

Frankly, tragically, Sir David has no business lending his golden credit to a call for more phantom wealth to be created by central banks, backed by bank-captive governments. The debt money trap is what finances the killing the world. Sir David should be telling us, solemnly, to look at our individual lives, our daily conscious decisions, the importance of reconnecting on a personal level to wild places, by loving and caring about them. Just like he’s always done.

He’s old and establishment; maybe he does believe money can solve our problem. But surely it’s also an old belief — an old establishment belief — that you can’t serve God and Mammon?

View On The City Of Utrecht

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JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT.
DUTCH STUDIES DIV.

1984, just before I started my year in Edinburgh, I had a summer course in Dutch culture at the Nijenrode Institute, a converted medieval castle in the dorp of Breukelen, the original Brooklyn. To get a borreltje, a brewski, the best bet was to head upriver (which is the dreamy Vecht, a branch of the Old Rijn) to spend a few hours in Utrecht.

The moment you step out of the vast modern, Tannoy-blaring ding-dong- Central Station, the largest and loudest in the Netherlands, you are under the elms in one of the finest living, working, pedestrian cities in the world.

As with Edinburgh (or Philadelphia for that matter), a walk around town can be a master class in urban studies. What Jane Jacobs said about Lower New York, the very greatest of all the old Dutch cities, applies a priori to Utrecht, the very oldest of all the great Dutch cities:

“Wherever lively and popular parts of cities are found, the small much outnumber the large…[small shops], small manufacturers…small enterprises would not exist somewhere else, in the absence of cities. Without cities, they would not exist. The diversity…generated by cities rests on the fact that in cities so many people are so close together, and among them contain so many different tastes, skills, needs, supplies, and bees in their bonnets. Even small operations like proprietor-and-one- clerk hardware stores, drug stores, candy stores and bars can and do flourish in extraordinary numbers in lively districts of cities because there are enough people to support them at short, convenient intervals, and in turn this convenience, and neighborhood-personal quality, are their stock in trade. Once they are unable to be supported at close, convenient intervals, they lose this advantage. In a given geographical territory, half as many people will not support half as many such enterprises spaced at twice the distance. When distance inconvenience sets in, the small, the various, and the personal wither away.”
Jane Jacobs, the Life and Death of Great American Cities.

Jan Hendrik Verheye, View of the Choir and Tower of Utrecht Cathedral

“To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable: 1. The district must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common. 2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent. 3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained. 4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there. This includes dense concentration in the case of people who are living there for residence. The necessity for these four conditions is the most important point this book has to make.”
Jane Jacobs, op. cit.

St. Maarten’s Dom, built 1381-1382; the tallest church tower in the Netherlands. It gives an unforgettable, life-changing View.

“Historically treated, architecture has seemed too long but a description of buildings, like fossil shells and corals, past and dead. Yet as an evolutionary science it begins anew with the living and growing city reefs, as we have seen them in their growth overflowing whole plains, ascending innumerable valleys. In this synoptic vision we have as yet had too little touch with the actual living polyps…”
Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution

The above photos were not great pictures; but in b/w they seemed more interesting, and I now realize why. There are, combined. about 600 years worth of architectural styles for townhouses in these two street corner views, from High Gothic to to trap-gabled Renaissance, to 18th Century, to creamy white Art Nouveau, each distinctly a Dutch house.

The sea is of course an intermittent threat, but it was the alternately roaring and slackening Rijn channels that had to be tamed.

“I have often amused myself,’ wrote James Boswell in 1791, “with thinking how different a place London is to different people. They, whose narrow minds are contracted to the consideration of some one particular pursuit, view it only through that medium…but the intellectual man is struck with it, as comprehending the whole of human life in all its variety, the contemplation of which is inexhaustible.” Boswell not only gave a good definition of cities, he put his finger on one of the chief troubles in dealing with them. it is so easy to fall into the trap of contemplating a city’s uses one at a time, by categories. Indeed, just this — analysis of cities, use by use — has become a customary planning tactic…to understand cities, we have to deal outright with combinations or mixtures of uses, not separate uses, as the essential phenomena.”
Jane Jacobs, op. cit.

Click below for a brilliant urban studies blog which explains in a few simple maps the ever-changing channels of the Rijn-Maas-Waal delta. Every river in Europe, practically, runs within a few miles. The Utrecht achievement was turning silted-up old channels into the unique sunken canal system that winds through town, allowing downstairs private wharf tie-ups to almost every house in town. This determined Utrecht’s growth, trade, and evolution. It started as a Roman fort, Ultra Trajectum, (the further ford), the ruins of which were taken over by St. Willibord as a missionary outpost to convert the Frisians. Thus it also became the center of Netherlandish Christianity, and an ecclesiastical state, the Prince-Bishopric of Utrecht, one of the intellectual and artistic centers of Europe.

http://snailinthecity.blogspot.com/2014/03/utrecht-reworking-floodplain.html

I got another amazing chance to visit in 1997, when Sam Elias took me to Amsterdam (blessings!) and I took him to see Utrecht. He loves cities and architecture as much as I do. I took him to Het Kasteel de Haar; then he educated me, by taking me out to see Het Rietveld Huis, one of the landmarks of De Stijl in the leafy rich suburbs: another distinctly Dutch house, and it fits right in.

The Stadsbuitensingel, the old moat, was overdecked to lure car traffic into town in the 1980s.

The canal in-filling began as a redevelopment scheme that put one of the largest malls in the Netherlands, Hoog Catharijne, next to the train station, along the Catharijnesingel, the long straight stretch of the moat. The re-designed mall is an even glitzier behemoth in the town center, but the parking lots are gone, and now you can once again sail your jacht down the ancient, restored bed of the Rijn, as it flows right under the mall, and tie up right there, to buy your Coach bags and Hermes scarves.

https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/motorway-removed-to-bring-back-original-water/

“In our present phase, town-planning schemes are apt to be one-sided, at any rate too few-sided. One is all for communications, another for industrial developments. Others are (more healthily) domestic in character, with provisions for parks and gardens; even by rare hap, for playgrounds, that prime necessity of civic survival. But too many [developments] reiterate that pompous imperial art, which has changed so little from the taste of the decadent Caesars of the past or present. In their too exclusive devotion to material interests they present the converse of those old Spanish and Spanish-American cities which seem almost composed of churches and monasteries. What is the remedy? For each and every city we need a systematic survey, of its development and origins, its history and its present. This survey is required not merely for material buildings, but also for the city’s life and its institutions, for of these the builded city is but the external shell.”
Patrick Geddes, op. cit.