by Joel Garreau
In fact, close questioning of the Murrays reveals that for them Manhattan is primarily an entertainment center. And they are not alone. Tourism is now the number one industry in New York City—ahead of financial services. It is also the fastest growing. This is good news for many of the old city’s most fragile and important institutions, from the theater to the symphony.
Many urban visionaries who have nobly devoted their entire lives to reviving the old downtown see the rise of Edge City as nothing but a threat. Every time a corporate headquarters leaves town for literally greener pastures, they bleed. They make it clear that they believe settlement patterns to be a zero-sum game. They assume that to the extent Edge City gains, their beloved downtown—and, by extension, Western civilization—loses.
The more I looked into this, however, the less evidence I found to support their theory. In the last decade, the downtowns have been going through their most striking revivals of this century. From coast to coast—Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle—downtowns are flourishing. Downtowns that no prudent person would have bet a week’s pay on twenty years ago—Los Angeles, Baltimore, even, my God, Trenton—are back. Manhattan went from bankruptcy to, for better or for worse, the Gilded Age of Donald Trump.
These downtowns were reborn at exactly the same time as Edge Cities boomed. Maybe it is only a coincidence. But maybe not. It may be that Edge Cities, by relieving the downtowns of trying to be all things to all people, actually did them a favor. The creation of new industry may be inherently messy and chaotic. Maybe moving it out to Edge Cities is what allowed us to look with fresh eyes at our downtowns. Tear up the old docks, for example, now that freighters no longer tie up there. Return the waterfront to the people. Build a South Street Seaport or a Battery Park City. Transform the old warehouses and lofts into condominiums and shops. It is as if our downtowns have become antiques, in the best sense of that word. Edge Cities may represent the everyday furniture of our lives, but we recognize the downtowns as something to be cosseted and preserved. The New Yorker magazine writer Tony Hiss has even suggested that it was misguided for Manhattan to compete with its surrounding Edge Cities for so much new office space in the 1980s. He feels that the old city would have been better served by preserving the sense of place that had been layered up there over the generations. “Tourists don’t like to visit office districts,” he points out in The Experience of Place. “Their interests are in seeing safe, beautiful, interesting places—places that afford vivid and memorable experiences.”
Whatever the case, the greatest glory of our old downtowns—their world-class museums and theaters—have been injected with new life. The more Edge Cities boomed, the more different places were created within the metropolitan region in which to locate high-paying work places. To the extent that this provided more opportunities for well-to-do people to make a living in the area, it yielded more patrons overall for downtown institutions of minority high culture like opera. If it were not for the attractions of 287 and 78, the Murrays might not be buying tickets to Off-Broadway. They might still be in Texas, fundraising for a ballet there.
Edge Cities may even be helping with the social problems of the old downtowns. The corporations of elite Princeton-Route 1 are taking an unprecedented, even flabbergasting, interest in the schools of gritty-city Trenton. They now realize that is where their future labor force will come from. Trenton is also a source of affordable housing. Huge old Victorians that, in the mid-1970s, were viewed as worthless dinosaurs, fetching $22,000 apiece, are now valued at more than $220,000. It defies description how enormous a change this is in only fifteen years in this once bombed-out burg. It was started by the scores of people who refused to let the old city die, no matter the personal cost. It was further enabled by a state government that would not aban don the state capital, in which George Washington clobbered the Hessians after crossing the Delaware.
But the renaissance could not have happened without money. And the source of jobs in America today is Edge City. That is why the future of downtown would actually appear to be secured by Edge City. Edge City pushes wealth back into blighted areas of the old downtown as its companies seek less expensive housing and labor. Downtown also offers Edge City visitors the amenities of a place built in an earlier era. This is especially attractive for the young and single and those otherwise without children in need of the kind of stimulation only a full-blown arts district can provide.
You can see this symbiosis starting between the Edge City of Cherry Hill and the mean streets of Camden, as with 287 and 78 and both New Brunswick and Allentown. It is hardly a panacea; jobs and housing should be in better balance. But many inner-city residents have found that making long journeys to jobs in Edge City is better than having no jobs at all.
After all, when it comes to the location of our homes, we Americans have been voting with our feet for some time now. Eighty-eight percent of all Americans live outside what has traditionally been defined as a big city—the political boundaries of a place at least the size of El Paso, with half a million population. (Only 8 percent of all Americans live in politically defined cities with more than a million population, like Los Angeles.)
Thus, it could be that without Edge City underpinning our society, the plight of the old downtowns would have been immeasurably worse. After all, metros like Phoenix have demonstrated that you can have many successful Edge Cities without much of a downtown. But places like St. Louis show that heroic efforts to revive downtown are only marginally successful in the absence of the economics that vigorously produce Edge Cities.
In fact, the relationship of Edge City to the old downtown may be parallel to how most people in this country experience the performing arts. Recordings will never replace live performances. In the late twentieth century, though, we usually meet human needs by commodifying them. Even the most dedicated disciple of Mozart buys more compact discs than performance tickets. If an American today has a yen for the finest acting, she’ll most commonly go out and rent some at a video store, like any sensible human being.
This is certainly what the Murrays do. “I like to get one foreign film for the weekend,” says Nancy. “Pelle the Conqueror was one I had out two weeks ago. This week it’s a Chinese film, Eat a Bowl of Tea. I used to really like going to the ballet. Now they have some good ballet tapes. Gregory loves it. The music calms him down if he’s cranky. I waltz around with him.”
This is not to say there are no live performances in Edge City. The local brags include the Shakespeare Festival at Drew, the Metropolitan Opera performing at Waterloo Village, the McCarter Theatre at Princeton, and the Playwrights Theatre in Madison. But even if the commodity you require is to have your soul lifted, the place to go is Bridgewater Commons. Select-a-Ticket inside the main entrance one weekend was offering access to The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, Eric Clapton at the Hartford, Connecticut, Civic Center, Cher at the Sands in Atlantic City, the International Opera Festival at Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands, and Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and Johnny Cash together at the Nassau Coliseum.
If the arts have any real problem in Edge City, thinks the urban designer Patricia L. Faux, it is simply that the founders of Edge City aren’t dead yet. Palaces of the arts usually aren’t built until the crusty old buzzards croak and the children give the money away.
Americans today spend more money attending cultural events than they do on spectator sports. That is way up from 1970, when, according to the National Endowment for the Humanities, we spent twice as much on sports. This increase is concurrent with the rise of Edge City, as well as the dispersal of the American population to the South and West. It would seem logical, then, that if there can be a serious dance company called Ballet Oklahoma, which there is, or an Alabama Shakespeare Festival that attracts 150,000 people, it’s possible to locate high culture in Edge City.
There are two kinds of cultural activity, Faux points out. Active, when the art is being created. And pas
sive, when it is being shown off. Many medium-sized downtowns, such as Fort Worth and Louisville, are setting up “culture districts” designed to support artists both as they are working and as they are displaying their art. She sees no reason that the idea won’t be worked into Edge City in the future. It wouldn’t surprise her, in fact, if an Edge City culture district ended up looking like a mall. After all, Edge City is the creation of people with money. If they want “culture,” they’ll doubtless get it. Especially if they’re nursing a nagging inferiority complex, and they think of a palace of culture, locally applied, as a hot, soft, moist poultice on their egos.
The glitziest temple of high culture built in California in the last decade, in fact, is the $73-million, three thousand-seat Performing Arts Center in the Edge City of Costa Mesa, in Orange County, near Irvine. It was completely privately financed. You can almost toss a croissant to it from South Coast Plaza—the most lavish mall in America, which does more retail business in a day than does all of downtown San Francisco. And that is not a coincidence, I think. The Orange County Performing Arts Center is across from the first mall in North America in which I encountered valet parking.
Compared to “culture” and “companionship,” the seventh definer of cities is a less comfortable fit in Edge City. It is “religion”—that binder of people together into congregations.
Lewis Mumford saw the start of cities in the most distant times in cemeteries. In their wanderings, dawn humans first began to distinguish themselves from other animals in the ritualistic burial of their dead and their desire to return to those burial places. Mumford writes:
In these ancient paleolithic sanctuaries, as in the first grave mounds and tombs, we have, if anywhere, the first hints of civic life, probably well before a permanent village settlement can even be suspected.
This was no mere coming together during the mating season, no famished return to a sure source of water or food, no occasional interchange, in some convenient tabooed spot, of amber, salt, jade, or even perhaps tools. Here, in the ceremonial center, is an association dedicated to a life more abundant: not merely an increase of food, but an increase of social enjoyment through the fuller use of symbolized fantasy and art, with a shared vision of a better life, more meaningful as well as aesthetically enchanting, such a good life in embryo as Aristotle would one day describe in the Politics: the first glimpse of Utopia.
In Edge Cities, there is still the occasional cemetery here and there. But if it is ever seen as “the first glimpse of Utopia,” it is only a wistful real estate agent heaving a sigh, recalling the day when land was so cheap here, people buried their dead in it.
Churches are the same way. They are not anathema to Edge Cities. One Houston developer approves of the one next to the Galleria as a “noncompeting low-density use.” But the closest thing I’ve seen to a cathedral in Edge City is Buckhead Plaza, north of downtown Atlanta. You don’t every day see twenty-story, 400,000-square-foot office buildings like this with flying buttresses, accent-spike gargoyles, and a gabled copper roof. If, in fact, one argues that a city is always a monument to the worship of something, it is clear that Edge City worships a prevailing god not the same as the one celebrated in the design of Jerusalem, Rome, Mecca, Kyoto, and Beijing.
But does this really mark any change in America?
While the Pilgrims came to America in 1620 to worship as they chose—and, even more important, to prevent other people from worshiping as they chose—that has rarely been the end-all of other American settlements. Cotton Mather wrote of the Massachusetts minister who urged a congregation on the rocky coast of Maine to “walk in the paths of righteousness and piety so that they would not ‘contradict the main end of Planting this Wilderness.’ ” At which point a prominent resident blurted out, “Sir, you are mistaken. You think you are Preaching to the People at the Bay; our main End was to catch Fish.”
Just so, the catching of fish has always been the purpose of cities of North America. Most Americans moved out to the frontier to get rich. It’s unusual to an American to think of a city as primarily a focus of religion. Salt Lake City has our only celebrated Temple Square.
Americans are about as religious today as they have ever been. Overwhelmingly, they tell pollsters they believe in God. They still flock to the ministry. To be sure, our elites tend to do neither. But that just results in a relationship between the ruling class and the masses in America that demographers have de scribed as the spiritual equivalent of “a Sweden on top of an India.”
Even for those Americans who are religious, however, close proximity to a physical monument to God seems not all that important. It is antique to hear a person describe himself in terms of “parish.” A large modern church functions like nothing so much as a spiritual shopping mall. It is surrounded by a very large parking lot located astride a good network of roads. If the traffic patterns yield an affordable location in the midst of Edge City, then so be it—the church becomes part of the city.
Otherwise, and far more typically, there is apparently no reason for any “ceremonial centers” dedicated to a “life more abundant” to be at the core of Edge City.
Those are built in residential areas.
The land is cheaper there.
The thick wooden floor planks resound with a nice thunk as one crosses the covered bridge over Mac’s Brook at Bridgewater Commons. Even though spring is only a promise and the Watchung Mountains are a cold gold in the late afternoon sun, the sound of the brook is soothing. It meanders through reeds and prickly snare and cedar and low willow in an unpremeditated way. Trails lead off this way and that, but they are low to the ground, arched and domed by vines. They were clearly shaped by animals no taller than a doe.
Down the path from the bridge and the water there is a good-sized gazebo of pressure-treated wood. At first, still in the thrall of the spirit of the stream, my heart sank at the sight of graffiti. But on closer examination, the marks turned out to be not so much the work of vandals. They were more like that of healthy young primates marking their space. “Lie here and dream,” somebody had written over one of the benches that edge the interior of the octagon. I did. The sky was moving. Grasses waved. There was no one else around. It was very peaceful.
For all the messages on the gazebo, surprisingly few were coarse. Many invoked the names of revered bands. Others were wry. First message: “I Heather—From Larry.” Below it: “I Larry Forever.” Third line: “He likes a different Heather.”
But most of the writing reflected attempts to grapple with the world we have built for these kids:
“And I wear black on the outside because black is how I feel on the inside, and if I seem a little strange, well that’s because I am.”
“You love to say you’ve loved, but in all reality you have no concept of what that means.”
Pomposity was punctured: First graffito: “Words of wisdom: Be excellent to each other.” Second line: “Other words of wisdom: Don’t have sex at this gazebo.”
Yet overwhelmingly, the wisdom was that of teens from time immemorial:
“Leslie is childish.”
“When all else fails, blame it on Sean.”
The covered bridge and gazebo at Bridgewater Commons don’t look like much from the food court on the third floor, or from the ring road at thirty miles an hour. From those perspectives they seem so small, so peripheral to the forces of Mammon, as to appear almost forlorn. In fact, as Susan Gruel drove me around, she pointed out the greenspace that had been saved here, and the outdoor plaza that was fought for there, and the way the mall had been turned around so that its main entrance would face not the interstate, but the small road that brings the local people here. She told the story of the little concert pit that was built over to the side of the mall. She first saw one just like it in a vest-pocket park when she was visiting her sister in Oklahoma City. People were sitting all around its steps, playing guitars in an ad lib concert, and she figured that would be great for Bridgewater, so she brought the
idea home. The concert pit was empty this day, however. Afraid that, through the eyes of a stranger, it didn’t look like much, she got quieter and quieter. Then she said, softly, of the amenities she and so many others had fought for: “I guess it depends on the way you look at it, whether you see it or not. But it was there, at least on the plans.”
“Edge City is an adaptable creature,” said Pamela Manfre later. She is a Washington consultant on the subject with whom I had been discussing my travels. “It fixes itself. It redefines itself. It’s almost as if we’re working out equations. We ‘solve for’ problems. We ‘solve for’ commutes. And then we ‘solve for’ sterility. And then we ‘solve for’ choice.”
Manfre’s vote of confidence came with a little added weight that day, because, although she had made partner at the age of twenty-eight, running the national capital office of a high-flying coast-to-coast firm, she announced she had just quit. She couldn’t totally explain it herself, she said. She was, she insisted, the staunchest of free-enterprise Republicans. It was by no means that she’d become a bleeding heart or anything. But it had finally dawned on her that this affordable housing thing out there in Edge City was going to have to get solved. People had to take responsibility. If people like her didn’t do it, nobody else was going to. She thought she could see clearly the path that needed to be taken; she was bubbling over with plans. So what the hell. She was going for it.
“We make a lot of mistakes, but we learn,” she concluded. “And in this culture, we let that happen more than in those with governments that try to protect people from their mistakes. We just go out there and do it.”
One hopes that’s true, and I have to admit that at the end of my visit with Susan Gruel, I found myself almost involuntarily stepping out of the reporter role to buck her up a little, to tell her that I did not think her efforts to honor the spirit of her place had been in vain. For Bridgewater Commons, after all, is a first-generation vision. It is an experimental effort in a national work in progress. Who knows whether it will ever be repeated. Who cares? The important part is that it was put together by individual citizens of no particular authority who were determined to bring life to their world. They didn’t know that there might be “experts” out there who thought it was impossible. But then again, they weren’t operating at the same scale as the experts. They were simply trying to come up with a better center for the people of their Edge City.