Word: urban
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...left, for the most part, with a casually destructive attitude toward Cambridge's vegetation. People here would rather brag about the number of dead trees on library shelves than laud the live ones that turn color outside. The trees that do eke out an existence here have a gritty urban sensibility. They're A Tree Grows in Brooklyn trees, struggling against pollution and graffiti; noble California redwoods or wild New Hampshire oaks they...
Determined to integrate a defiantly all-white housing project in a mostly white Texas burg, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros ordered the federal seizure of Vidor Village, a public housing facility in the town of Vidor, and fired the heads of the local housing authority. Under court order to desegregate, the facility accepted nine black residents last spring, but all have left because of racial harassment. Cisneros, once mayor of San Antonio, Texas, promised that 10 to 12 new black families will soon arrive in Vidor...
Government-sponsored urban-renewal schemes are bad almost by definition, since they derive from the bureaucrat's impulse to tidy up, to eradicate funk and chaos in favor of large-scale orderliness; planners fail to see the trees for the forest. During the past couple of decades, the relentlessly-raze-and- rebuild notion of progress has been overtaken by a mania for historic preservation, which is a great improvement. But preservationism can also tend toward the prissy, the anal and the monomaniacal and become a kind of by-the- book undertaker's approach that makes dead and dying downtowns prettier...
This basic recipe isn't new: in her profoundly important The Death and Life of Great American Cities 32 years ago, Jane Jacobs declared that urban vitality depends on an eclectic mix of small stores. But that doesn't mean developers and bureaucrats haven't continued to pursue monumental, street- life-killing projects. Since 1981 the plan for 42nd Street envisioned four monstrous office towers. Lawsuits filed against that plan by neighborhood porno impresarios were beaten back, but they delayed the project for years -- enough time, fortuitously, for the real estate crash to kill it last year. Because the developers...
TELEVISION Conan O'Brien brings a fresh face but a familiar style to late night. CINEMA Adorable Macaulay Culkin plays a bad seed in The Good Son. Into the West is a fairy tale of modern Ireland. MUSIC John Mellencamp's new album is part small-town twang, part urban soul and all American. Lord Byron, Virgil Thomson's last opera, is not Byronic enough. BOOKS A first novel by Frank Conroy needs a sound track...