NEWSSTANDS P.2
Can you imagine a 10’ X 8’ giant TV screen on the back of a newsstand? Try harder. It’s coming. Blade Runner, Big Brother, thar she blows. What is disappearing is the concept of the sidewalk newsstand as an independent business.go to Newsstand article
BUS SHELTERS P.3
If there are 17,000 Bus Stops, how come only 3,000 or so will get any kind of shelter? Couldn’t we at least put an umbrella over the other 14,000, even though you may not be able to sell, and nobody really wants, a billboard there?go to Bus Shelter article
“AUTOMATIC” PUBLIC TOILETS P.4
A non- “self-cleaning automatic” toilet brings to mind smelly outhouses and “public”, in this context, has too often meant dangerous and dirty places, but face it, when you gotta go, you gotta go, so let’s do this right.
go to Public Toilets article
INFORMATION TERMINALS P.5
When they were proposed previously, there was no way for them to be used by individuals or businesses from that block, to help find local employment opportunities or free events, or display art, etc. They were useless.go to Information Terminals article
BRANDING IS THE ORDER OF THE DAY
PRIVATIZATION, CONSUMERISM AND SUGAR ASSUME MANY SHAPES TO SEDUCE SCHOOL-KIDS
GET THEM WHERE THEY WAIT FOR THE BUS, GO TO CLASS AND WORSHIP THEIR SPORTS IDOLS
TRIPLE PLAY OF SNAPPLE, STREET FURNITURE AND STADIUM TURNS INTO GLUEY GOOEY MESS
go to Branding article
NEWSSTANDS
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HISTORY
Many 19th century Newsboys (and Newsgirls), disabled vets and blind folk, became sidewalk newsdealers. 300 out of their 1500 were left, after the rest were forced out of business by dishonest distributors, greedy real estate interests and corrupt and heartless politicians. They were left to the un-tender mercies of the Times and the tabloids, who now station hawkers right on their corners to sell papers at half the cover price. If everybody keeps buying more of their smokes from the reservation, it may not pay to open up at all, one day. In spite of their current limitations, sidewalk newsdealers, actually and symbolically, represent the last outpost of human-scale habitation within our shared spaces. No matter how many homely plastic boxes spit out free papers each day, they do not make change or give directions.
CURRENT PLAN
Seven years ago, the city tried to take away all the licenses, and failed in Federal court. The new plan calls for probably wedging most of these businesses invisibly in between two giant electronic sandwich boards, and simultaneously transferring their ownership to the franchisee, Clear Channel, Viacom, whomever, and the city. The loss to the newsdealer of valuable display space, and to us of a phenomenon that in its diversity and variety, typified for many, the New York Way of doing things, will disappear entirely. Everything will now be the same, allegedly to have a “Coordinated” design. Actually this boring uniformity is a lot cheaper than getting real artists and craftspeople to make beautiful things that truly reflect their unique neighborhoods. This suits the franchisee and its “partner”, the city, just fine. There has been no meaningful interaction between the city and newsdealers throughout this process. Now a lawsuit has been filed by them, on 1st amendment and other grounds, and the city’s whole plan could fail.WHAT IS WRONG WITH IT?
Grouping newsstands as just one more kind of “street furniture” ignores the obvious: humans are not just things. There was a war fought about 150 years ago, that made this one of its main points. Treating people and the enterprises, which they have cultivated over a period of several decades, the same way as you do a bus pole, is probably illegal and definitely unfair, especially when it is done on behalf of a large private entity, not the people. Tying the future of all of our public-space located activity to the billboard advertising industry, and their often socially-negative and unhealthy products, is irrational and self-destructive to our neighborhoods. How can you stop communities from doing everything they can to prevent the siting of these small businesses, when they are really rejecting its huge 5’ X 8’ billboards?
WHAT COULD IT BE INSTEAD?
What is most disturbing about current plans is that there is no attempt being made here to dramatically upgrade conditions within this profession, and its capacity to serve the public, as well as its operators. Newsdealers once were the information nodes of their localities, some of the most familiar and well-known local people, and could be again. Freezing everything in place, even going backwards, as is happening now, is wasteful and unnecessary. While it should be totally voluntary on the part of newsdealers, there are many beneficial ways to expand profitable activities, while expanding services to the public. This would require lifting or removing the current pitifully low $5 ceiling on the allowable amount of transactions, and integrating newsstands into an expanded role as expeditors of information and transportation services to the public. That could include renting a car, a wheelchair or an electric bike, or booking a cruise to the Med.
If the city gets a cut, as it does from the billboard income, so be it. It is the public’s space after all.
WHY SHOULD I CARE WHAT HAPPENS TO SIDEWALK NEWSDEALERS?
Helping those who can help you in return, can be a very good investment. By minding our space and helping to expedite our use of our own resources, like the sidewalk, newsdealers can help us to enrich ourselves. Transportation and Information are universal needs. You should count how many times a day a newsdealer is asked for directions. We need a re-definition of the 19th century concept of newsdealers, to encourage them to expand their enterprises into local broadcasters and reservoirs of our shared lives. Our growing physical isolation is troubling to some and destructive to all. If local history is posted at stands, and pictures of our neighbors glorying in and mourning their fates, keyed to companion websites, some will think it is corny. To those of us living here, when these people and places begin to assume their proper roles, as part of our stake in our own public spaces, we stand to benefit in ways that are too important to put a number on. Besides, if that were you out there, what conditions would you expect or deserve
BUS SHELTERS
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HISTORY
Thirty years ago, we got our first bus shelters, and they were filled with big ads telling kids waiting for the bus to smoke cigarettes, although now ads are likely to be for alcohol. Drafty and barely usable then, they still are. Since city governments share in the proceeds, they have gotten in the habit of giving all of the responsibility for designing the structures and the programs that accompany them, to the businesspeople who run the billboard industry. This is a de facto surrender of political power to self-centered interests, with implications in many other areas. This is the privatization of key public assets, and the blurring of the lines between these two notions, on a grand scale, and dressed in lots of bright and pretty colors.
CURRENT PLAN
The new contract does not call for the needed radical improvement in the quality and usefulness of these facilities. It is likely that roofs will become a little more transparent, they’ll be new and slicker but probably not very much more protective. Franchisees may also offer to “retrofit” some locations, the kind of re-use which could make sense in many situations. Here though, this could be interpreted as adding a bench, or an only slightly-upgraded version of its hopelessly under-equipped predecessor. Some see bus shelters as a triumph of minimalist urban planning and design. Maybe that is true in Arizona, but try telling that to a bunch of drenched commuters waiting 35 minutes for a bus in blustery weather.WHAT IS WRONG WITH IT?
It was made to hold a billboard, be cheap and easy to build and maintain, and not get store-owners any more angry than necessary. The passengers’ needs have been last on the list, along with all the non-bus passengers who have to look at these things all day and walk around them. The walls don’t touch and they reach neither the roof nor the sidewalk. While the winds have little discouragement in wintertime, there is not even a fan in the summer. They do nothing for you when the weather is really bad and the wind and cold and rain are blowing around. There is nothing there to tell you where you are, who the people are who work and live there, who just got born or died. There is no history, no directions to needed services, emergency, medical, oxygen, or defibrillator or perhaps just a toilet.
WHAT COULD IT BE INSTEAD?
They could be genuinely protective. There could be some form of shelter at nearly all 17,000 bus stops, even if some were little more than a kind of umbrella. They could incorporate some other street furniture, from information terminals to newsstands. Adding the human element, where space permits, means giving the newsdealers and neighborhood volunteers who are helping to make our city more human and livable, their own proper working spaces, where residents/visitors/customers can get a range of useful services.HOW ABOUT UNIQUE NEIGHBORHOOD TRANSPORTATION
AND INFORMATION CENTERS
New York City’s symbol around the world is not a fruit-drink, it’s a crowded sidewalk. Adrenaline is the juice here, and it is the people who produce it. We don’t need the artificial sense of excitement that big ads convey, we’ve got the real one. Transportation and geography got this city where it is, and the density to support almost anything has kept it there. This 20 year grant of sidewalk space will not produce what we need, real “Neighborhood Transportation and Information Centers”. Expediting ride-sharing and vehicle-sharing are only two of the ways that these facilities can amplify our natural advantages to the maximum. By staging design contests, we can use these glass walls as exhibit spaces, while local residents decide what kind of structures, or sculptures, that they want to make part of their community, instead of just ads, telling you that you want to be somebody else, with better abs, or somewhere else, with better weather. These objects can be beautiful reminders of who we are and what we do, and help in getting where we’re going, healthfully and quickly. The alternative is to make them empty and shallow provocations, to encourage us to consume, to be somebody that we can’t be, and meanwhile, be almost completely useless.YOU CAN DO THIS……………………
Say hello to your newsdealer and listen to their story. Get on the phone or email and let the media and your representatives know what you think about this. If you are in a group, encourage them to talk about it. Post some info from this paper. Start a local design contest, to create, or embrace and upgrade a new or old sign of life, in our otherwise abandoned shared spaces. Adopt a bus stop.“AUTOMATIC” PUBLIC TOILETS
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WHAT IS “AUTOMATIC”Listen, I know “automatic”. I have the last 100 “AUTOMAT” machines, the ones with the little windows in them. Horn and Hardart invented mass production a few years before Henry Ford and had the best cup of coffee in the world for a nickel, and macaroni and cheese to die for,,,,but I digress. Further evidence: my shop is across the street from the laboratory of Nikola Tesla, who invented the radio and AC current and motor and the “TELAUTOMATON”, which was the world’s first radio-controlled anything. This does not make me an expert on anything, but aren’t all of the toilets we use today “AUTOMATIC” already? It is also evident that making something that is very reasonably priced and works fairly well already, and automating it so that it costs $100,000 and breaks down fairly often, makes absolutely no sense.
Non-Automatic toilets were called privies and outhouses, and it so happens that I have one of the last operating ones in my backyard at 49 East Houston Street. They dug it up on my last birthday and it goes 17 feet deep, is circular, over six feet in diameter and made of neat rectangular brownstone blocks. It produced hampers full of pottery shards and bottles, clay pipes and even a piece of gold with the word “Mary” on it. You’re welcome to come down and take a look in this 1820’s relic. Hours are 10 AM to 6PM, rain or shine. Think of it as the prequel to the “Tenement” Museum. Nothing was automatic back then.
By the way, if it costs money, it is therefore not available to some members of the public who do not, ahem, happen to have the coin presently. It is therefore, not a completely “PUBLIC” toilet at all. Furthermore, if it closes after 8 pm, as these are planned to, than it is not even a toilet about half the time, (if you don’t count its outside wall). These are the hours, by the way, when it is most needed because of the fewer alternatives available to the bands of beer-swilling vandals, urban legends have it, relentlessly cruising our poor sidewalks.
But.......there is a solution. And it also will eliminate the other and to many, most significant potential hazard, according to neighborhood-watchers, of giving the public access to toilet facilities: their misuse.
FREE-STANDING UNITS CAN BE TIED TO VENDING OPPORTUNITIES.
Giving a local person oversight over the little space provided for proper toilet use can generate many benefits besides improved security. The ADA requires a quite large space, in which two persons doing mischief could easily fit, in order to accommodate wheelchairs. Having an “attendant”, who is really just a vendor with some attendant-like duties, means that a small space, suitable for a single person, can be enlarged to provide for wheelchair access when needed. This flexibility expands the unit’s utility while lessening the likelihood of problems. If these places are nearby parks, as is planned, why not allow this vendor to rent and sell sports equipment and clothing, provide healthy snacks and memberships in health clubs or tickets to sporting events. It is already commonplace, if you have a food-oriented concession in a park, to be required to maintain the “facilities” that go with it. You can charge the people for use who can afford it, and let those who plead poverty get a free ride. At some of the best locations, as in Paris, attendants make a good living on the tips alone.
NEED FOR 2000 LOCATIONS FOR NYC, OR 20,000, NOT THE 20 UNITS PROMISED
The program that the city is currently proposing, is a symbolic, not a real one. There are organizations like the “Public Restroom Initiative” and the “World Toilet Congress” who take this subject, which is always treated by the media as a bad locker-room joke, as the deadly-serious issue it is. We were further ahead 100 years ago, when it comes to Public Hygiene. It was said that, in the years from 1850-1950, sanitation engineers saved more lives than doctors. Shame on us!
MEANS TO REWARD PARTICIPATING LOCATIONS AND EXPAND SYSTEM TO FULLNESSWe already have a fairly extensive system that needs to be turned back on, in transit and parks, and in addition to the already legally-mandated government locations. Most importantly, many private businesses of all kinds, if rewarded appropriately for their efforts, will be pleased to be part of a community-wide effort to remedy this important lack. Starbucks and others already provide hundreds of accessible free toilets during long hours of operation. Getting the information out to people about where they are located is a big part of it, which brings up the next subject.....................
COMPUTER INFORMATION TERMINALS
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WHY ARE THEY 4’ X 4’ X 8’ ?
The dimensions provided in the current contract are identical to those in a previous Request for Proposals. It was to have been covered with two billboards, three large TV’s with ads and a “zipper” ad running around it. According to this RFP there will be no advertising, except a 2’ X 2’ logo, but it is unclear whether in times of greater economic stress, these could be converted into colorful electronically-wired cash registers. And if rock bands and moving companies cover them with “stickies”?
HISTORY OF POSTING PLACES AS ORIGINAL FORM OF PRESS
Once upon a time, public space was used by the King to post pronouncements, rewards for the capture of anti-monarchists and the like. Eventually the merchant class caught on and began to advertise livestock auctions etc. Now we have the internet, which means information is virtually free, to those with a PDA or other portable computer terminal. For the rest of us, access is still an issue. Even lame bands deserve a place to signify, and the existence of new information resources means that we must re-design and re-establish the public posting place, and, this time around, give the entire public their due. Limiting them to use by certain of the largest interests only, is a return to the Middle Ages.LOCAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Many blocks in New York City have the same population as other cities. Every one is a town without a name. Giving local residents and businesses a chance to freely advertise their services can provide a strong, friendly nudge towards generating the most localized possible economic support structure. Naturally, it would make much more sense to locate these terminals, where possible, as part of bus stops, already conveniently scattered throughout the city, rather than creating a new location every time. Meanwhile, we can build this system on the web, in preparation for its eventual placement where it belongs, in our public spaces.UNIQUENESS VS. UNIFORMITY
We know that a certain amount of uniformity in the design of electronics is needed to establish compatibility throughout the system. Beyond those technical demands, all design issues should be settled by those in proximity to the location.
DANGER OF SINGLE PROVIDER
Is anyone else out there concerned about giving control of our public information assets to Clear Channel or Viacom or one of their corporate cousins? They have demonstrated, more than once, that on those occasions when their business interests compel them to please their government partners by restricting the public’s access to information, they are more than happy to play that role.
WILL SYSTEM INCLUDE INTERNET?
Public computer terminals must have access to the entire internet. The only way to moderate this should be for many of these terminals to be located at newsstands, where you would have to provide proof of age, as in buying cigarettes, to be given access to an un-filtered terminal. Time limits, when others are waiting to use it, would be needed. It might be possible to provide financial support for the system through commissions on transactions there.
NEED FOR IN EMERGENCIES
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a place where important notices regarding public health, or transit, or weather or extra free tickets to a local event, could have a home, for all to see?
BRANDING
Even though only a relatively small ad is currently allowed on these terminals, which may up being little more than merchandise catalogues anyway, there is the issue of branding.........
BRANDING
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“Branding” of humans takes a long series of repeated intrusions into the soft tissue of our brains and eyes, and the effect of a prolonged series of light impressions over time is needed to form these permanent adhesions to our psyche. The earlier the process is begun, ergo as kids, the better. The goal here is to replace our free will with predictable, unconscious, automatic actions, in response to an infinitude of carefully programmed, now only vaguely remembered images and notions. It’s advertising’s ultimate weapon, as Kleenex and Coke and numerous politicians, and others, from Death Valley to Silicon Valley, have discovered.
Bids for the 20 year-long “Street Furniture” franchise are due at the beginning of August. This gives one company, probably Viacom or Clear Channel, the right to decorate newsstands, bus shelters and a handful of public toilets, with giant, glowing, sometimes moving, ads. Included also are an unlimited number of 4 foot high trash receptacles and 9 foot tall information kiosks, with ads too.
One twist is that 20% of the “Street Furniture” billboard ads are to be reserved for the city’s new “marketing partners”. The only one of these partners currently is Snapple, whose recently awarded contracts put 10,000 billboards, badly disguised as vending machines, in all grade schools, junior high and high schools, in public buildings and on city property. Must hallways, like sidewalks, all look like highways? This, seemingly “steered”, contract award, is now the subject of a State Supreme Court lawsuit by William Thompson, NYC’s comptroller, who insists this deal reeks of “cronyism” and worse.
I HAVE AN IDEA! WE’LL CALL IT THE SNAPPLYMPICS!
Also being put into play at this time is Manhattan’s proposed West Side stadium, as a spur to the selection of NYC for the Olympics, whose five interlocking rings are, maybe, the ultimate brand. This event generates an international roster of government officials and politicians, ad and p.r. agencies, the largest companies, mega-media, and sports team owners and celebrities. This classic mix propels an unwholesome intermingling of government and corporate agendas. Sports are tributes to elitism, parochialism and nationalism, and exercises in hero-worship, even if concealed within one of the few real meritocracies. Here in NY, a large private company, the Jets, wants $600 million of public funds to help build its own, and the Olympics’ home field. Snapple too is helping to blur the line between “Public” and “Private” monies and activities by using the sponsoring of school sports teams, and role in “Street Furniture”, as the most visible ways to grow closer to their new, public-sector “partners”.
The temporary rental of our attention is, to many, just a natural extension of other forms of advertising, and therefore a trivial issue. What is different about the “outdoor” (now indoor, too) medium, is that we are unable to avoid it, even if we try. Coercion changes everything. It is the difference between a play date and a kidnapping. This is the loss of a fundamental freedom, and a new form of taxation without choice. Slowly, it is becoming less and less “our” world out there.
Most frightening is that a ramping up of efforts to maintain our predictability, also must involve attempts to reverse our evolution. Modifying our behavior in this way is done to make us more manageable, to keep us as close as possible to poor dumb animals. The good news is that all this one-sided psychological warfare depends entirely upon our constantly increasing willingness to submit uncomplainingly to its inevitability, and is only ever one great collective breathe-in away, from turning in a whole new direction.
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