I've wanted to have a half bath on the first floor for some time now, but without tearing out the back staircase there is no room for it. There is a space under the front staircase where there's enough room for a toilet, but not a sink. I thought about having a urinal and a sink installed, but it seems a lot of bother for half the usefulness! I heard about the great toilets in Japan (where space is at a premium) with sinks on the top of the toilet tank. I presumed it was a special toilet that I'd have to ship from Japan for who knows how much, but alas, there is light! The device is rather an adjustable retrofit sink that will fit over most any toilet tank! It uses water right from the tank allowing you to pee, fush and rinse without using extra water. The best part, it's only $89 plus shipping! If you have a space that's not quite big enough, take advantage of an improvisation that Japan has known for years and save water too! LINK

Eric Miller on 08.31.07 @ 03:11 PM PST [link]  

There's something odd about the Park Avenue photos posted below. Park Avenue was originally Fourth Avenue and the New York Central trains ran on the street to Grand Central, which opened in 1870 (the present structure was built later). Park Avenue may have once been a park as the picture suggests, but it wouldn't seem it could have been a park for very long. Also its doubtful to me that the name "Park" Avenue could stem from the Avenue originally being a "park" as the name appears to originate in 1860 or before. Its also doubtful it was even entirely closed to auto, streetcar, railroad and/or wagon traffic. The median in Park Avenue is unusually wide even today and there are six or more lanes. The photo may have been shot from the middle and traffic lanes, maybe only one or two, on either side are out of view. Park Avenue also changes as you move along. The top photo with the park shows St Bartholomew's, built in 1918. Here's how the street was described in a Times article: "In 1914, the parish decided to move to Park Avenue, a factory street that a new crop of apartment houses for the well-to-do was turning into an elite boulevard."

The photo with the cars might be between the Terminal and the Helmsley/NYC building. Its an interesting photo anyway and if there's a New York historian who could flush out the truth here, it would be interesting to know. Today Park Avenue is still known for its plantings, primarily begonias, which are maintained with the help of a fund set up for that purpose, and its still nice to think for a fleeting minute a street with twenty story plus buildings could be a park.

Eric Miller on 08.26.07 @ 05:08 PM PST [link]  

Nashville may be a long way from Greece, but the city's Centennial Park may be as close as you can come without leaving the United States. Also, until the Greek ministry completes its restoration and reconstruction of the original Parthenon, the Nashville replica may be the closest you can come to the building as it was built by the Greeks in 400 B.C. anywhere.

Once known as the "Athens of the South," Nashville is not the only place where one can get a taste of the Parthenon in the United States. When Steel Magnate Andrew Carnegie stood on a Pittsburgh hilltop pondering an "Athens of the North" which would become Pittsburgh's cultural center, what he had in mind was a cultural facility that would collect the old masters of tomorrow.

READ MORE

Eric Miller on 08.25.07 @ 02:56 PM PST [link]  

Anyone who doubts the devastation cars have wrought on our civic culture need only look at this series of three images of Park Avenue in New York.

The uppermost image is a photo of the avenue taken sometime before 1922 and shows it as it was originally designed--an almost bucolic parkway between rows of stately edifices. Elegance, openness, and a sense of civility abound.

The second image shows it after 1922, when it was widened to accommodate the growing automobile traffic. The street is crowded with metal; an air of impatience prevails; and the charm is already gone....

The third image is as it looks today, grim as any Stalinist architecture, cluttered, ugly, littered with signs forbidding the entry of humans unaccompanied by cars--a wasteland, a place no one would volunteer to spend time in. The view is all of boundaries and prohibitions, of mvoement channeled and rigidly controlled, and there is no place to set foot. It is designed for speed, but the accommodation of speed reduces the volume it can carry even of cars.... It is a dead space.

This excellent series was assembled by "No Impact Man," a New Yorker dedicated to making city life worth living again; be sure to visit his excellent blog, where you can see larger versions of these images in his entry, "What Cities Could Be". It's full of passion and practicality, and there are dozens of links to follow to useful and exhilarating sites, as well as his own postings on matters as diverse and as important to urban culture (and human survival) as eating locally, bicycling and walking, activism, and low-impact living in general.

Richard Risemberg on 08.24.07 @ 07:35 PM PST [link]  

The Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP) and the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) recently released a study, Driven to Spend: Pumping Dollars out of Our Households and Communities, which shows that families are paying a high price to meet their transportation needs and families in areas with fewer transportation choices carry even greater burdens.

Driven to Spend updates prior transportation cost studies published by STPP and CNT, but for the first time provides information on the effect of gas prices on family budgets. The study ranks 28 metropolitan areas on their combined transportation and housing costs and recommends specific actions that governments – federal, state and local – can take to reduce the burden of transportation costs for families by investing in more transportation options.

Key findings of Driven to Spend include:

Households in regions that have invested in public transportation reap financial benefits from having affordable transportation options, even as gasoline prices rise.

Low-income families are unduly impacted by higher transportation costs since transportation expenditures claim a higher percentage of their family budgets.

For the first time, the study analyzed the effects of gasoline price hikes and ranked areas by the jump in household expenditures due gas prices. From 2003-2004, Los Angeles area families paid $316 more per
household for gasoline, with families in the Kansas City metro area paying $312 more for the second highest increase. The New York metro area posted the smallest increase at $220 per household.

Families in the Houston (TX) metropolitan area have the highest overall transportation expenditures at 20.9 percent, followed by the Cleveland (OH) and Detroit (MI) metro areas at 20.5 percent, Tampa (FL) at 20.4 percent, and Kansas City (MO) at 20.2 percent. The national average was 19.1 percent, making 2003 the second highest year for transportation costs as a share of family budget in the last twenty years. Transportation expenditures in 2002 set a record for the period at 19.2 percent.

The five areas where families expended the smallest share of their household budgets for transportation services were the Baltimore (MD) metro area at 14 percent, Portland (OR) at 15.1 percent, New York (NY) and Washington, DC areas at 15.4 percent and Philadelphia (PA) at 15.9 percent.

Eric Miller on 08.21.07 @ 01:45 PM PST [link]  

This image is being linked from a Chinese web site showing an array of not so convincing brand knock-offs. If you find this amusing, you may be interested in these products from our store Click Here

Eric Miller on 08.15.07 @ 04:09 AM PST [link]  

Eric Miller on 08.14.07 @ 06:34 PM PST [link]  

Since 9-11 it would seem there has been a general closing of the American mind. There’s been a closing of our borders, of our optimism and our desire to be welcoming. Where once Reagan talked about tearing down walls in Germany, today we talk about building them along the U.S.-Mexican border. The waits for passports and visas are getting longer, and the number of refugees, even from Iraq, being admitted into the U.S. is negligible.

I am currently reading a book about Fitz H. Lane, a nineteenth century marine painter and one quote struck me. Today we think of New England as provincial, but once it was dynamic. Bostonian Erza S. Gannett had this to say:

“Every packet ship…brings…the thought and feeling which prevail there, to be added to our stock of ideas and sentiments. We welcome each new contribution. We read and reprint foreign literature, we copy foreign manners, we adopt the…rules of judgment which obtain abroad. This is natural. It is foolish to complain about it.”

I started to think about how a new city goes from this dynamic paradigm into one of a successful city which tries to protect its might by tightening the noose on outside influences, to one that enters into decline.

When we think back through history, the time and places that contribute so much to human civilization are times and places that have a variety of influences are are unusually open to new ideas, methods, technologies and customs, from Boston in the 1830s to San Jose in the 1990s.

If we want to continue to add to the wealth of human intelligence and allow society to progress, we must work to adopt this mindset and allow the energy, people, wisdom, technology, sweat and knowledge to flow in.

Eric Miller on 08.01.07 @ 04:17 AM PST [link]