Parking and the Beginning of Destined Relationship

It was early enough in the morning that I hadn’t showered yet when two community activists from Durham, North Carolina reached me by telephone in early 1989.

I was living in a two story apartment on one side of a 1926 duplex that rested on its own single garage and had just sat down at my desk in a bay window overlooking Divisadero Street, barely a half block off the Bay along the northern edge of San Francisco.

Parking was on my mind as I watched cars that had been using street parking being shuffled below, a behavior quantified in a new survey and report I just read.

But before I go there, first let me give a little personal history.

The callers were scouting me via telephone to find out whether I might be the right fit to jumpstart what would be in part, their community’s frontline guardian of sense of place.

As was my routine each morning during that few months of hiatus from visitor-centric economic development, part of my reflection was an early morning walk.

The route took me a half block to the Marina District Yacht Club and then west along a coastal path, which was then under discussion as part the planning for a San Francisco Bay Trail.

With the Golden Gate looming ahead I would turn back south at the Presidio, which was then still an active Fort, through the remnants of the 1915 world’s fair, the Panama-Pacific Exposition.

I always made a pit stop for breakfast at a little hole-in-the-wall diner up on Chestnut St before heading north down Divisadero back to the apartment while sometimes detouring up to Pacific Heights.

The Marina District had originally been a landfill where demolition materials were dumped among some dunes, tidal flats and marshland following the 1906 earthquake.

It was then filled in by dredging to become the site of the eight-month 1915 world’s fair to showcase the area’s dramatic recovery.  It was ironic that my career in community marketing had begun 59 years later at a world’s fair to celebrate the environment.

The exposition was also where cities and states west of the Rockies first made a concerted case to be seen as destinations for tourism under the banner of “See America First.”

After the exposition, which was followed by WWI, the land was sold to developers in the 1920s.  With their building, including erection of my apartment, this had become the pedestrian-scaled Marina District and a derivation from Mediterranean Revival that is “singularly San Franciscan.”

It was the perfect spot for reflection, to learn self-forgiveness and contemplate the resurrection of my career in sense of place.

I hadn’t given North Carolina or Durham much thought at that point in my life and this area didn’t warrant inspection during the journey’s published a few years earlier by William Least Moon in his book Blue Highways.

My brushes until that call had been subliminal, perhaps, but nonetheless, in hindsight, a sort of “destiny” groundwork.

What little I knew about it came from watching NC State legend David Thompson lead the Americans to a 1974 victory over the Russians in Spokane where I had begun my career in community destination marketing.

I had several friends from North Carolina during my next stop in Anchorage including Steve Cowper, a native Tar Heel who had practiced law out of his Volkswagen and was known as the “High Plains Drifter.”  That was before he had become Governor of Alaska.

We had met when a mutual friend in Anchorage persuaded both of us, as a favor to her, to attend a speed-dating event.  Another friend there from North Carolina, Tennys Owens, had lived in Durham while her husband Tom attended law school at Duke.

A few months before that call from Durham I had watched Bull Durham, the movie, and learned that a friend was heading up the destination marketing organization a bit further “down east” in Raleigh.

He is the one that brought my name to Durham’s attention.

But as I asked around after the phone interview, I learned that a new acquaintance, Joe Morgan, who was a friend of a friend, had played minor league baseball in Durham at the launch of his hall of fame career.

I also learned that during WWII, my landlord had undergone officers training in Durham at Duke University.

And just two days before that life-altering call from Durham, I had watched Kansas defeat Duke in the NCAA Final Four, the beginning of my being a Duke fan and a premonition, perhaps.

Durham was intriguing, and the governing board for visitor-centric economic development there decided I was too, so after finishing the last two decades of my career here, it is now my home in retirement.

My last memory of the Marina was watching images broadcast from the blimp that had been covering the World Series capture some buildings burn a block south from where I had lived on Divisadero.

The 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquate had struck there a dozen weeks after my arrival in Durham.  Coincidentally, Roger Craig, a Durham native, was managing the San Francisco Giants in that game.

What does all of that have to do with parking?

The Marina District was one of a handful of San Francisco neighborhoods to participate in a multi-year pilot project for “smart parking” between 2011 and 2013.

This is a system of wireless sensors, new meters and demand-responsive pricing.  Click here for a full post-pilot evaluation report.

An incredible 30% of urban traffic is caused by people circling the block searching for parking.  Click here for a trends report on programs such as San Francisco’s, including surveys and case studies, which is summarized in the infographic shown as an image in this essay.

“Smart parking” reduces congestion, reduces miles driven as well as emissions, and increases parking revenue.  But the real payoff is that it results in an increase of 179% in taxable retail sales.

Another in the legion or reasons that street-side and roadside billboard are so ineffective (.2% of purchasing decisions) is because travelers have dramatically shifted to GPS now, including smartphones, for directions and purchasing decisions.

They have a consumer turn-off ratio of 7-to-1 and the blight they create and the trees they sacrifice not only destroy sense of place but result in an extremely high cost-to-benefit ratio.

Signaling that companies who own or sell space on billboards should shift to other out-of-home alternatives or some other line of business entirely is that 95% of a car’s life is spent sitting in a garage, parking lot or parked on the street.

Urban planners have no idea how many parking spaces their communities have and continue to use ratios for developers that result in far too many.

As a by-product of smart parking that data is collected and parking space utilization not only maximized but impervious surface minimized.

It is a transformation that Durham transportation officials have been watching closely while experimenting with parking policies that may tip the balance against sense of place in one of Durham’s organic districts.

One thing I learned during my now concluded career is that a community can preserve sense of place but it is created organically.  However, forces there including public policy can destroy it.

“Smart parking” while dramatically reducing parking requirements may also end up helping to preserve districts where sense of place has emerged as if by magic.

Still Finding It Hard

Two fault lines are among the many things that distinguish Durham, North Carolina, where I live, from Raleigh further southeast.  These two cities are otherwise only confused by those who view geography through the lens of airports.

A fault line is a fracture deep in the earth.  Durham and RDU, in fact, lie upland from the Jonesboro Fault.  About 74 million years ago, what is now Durham might have been able to add ocean views and beaches to its unique sense of place.

If above water at all, what is now Raleigh would be in dire need of the kind of waterproofing underway in New York today as a hedge against climate change.

When I arrived in Durham twenty-five years ago from my lifetime until then at various points along the western slopes of the Rockies, a friend in Raleigh told me, “One of these places might just as well be Kuala Lumpur and the other Tulsa.”

If one of those fault lines had slipped a little further several hundred million years ago as the continents were still forming, Raleigh could easily have become part of what is Africa now while Durham attached itself to North America.

By the time a young New York Times (NYT) correspondent named Frederick Law Olmsted traveled through North Carolina in the very early 1850s, one of his cousins once removed (who shared a grandfather with FLO’s father,) had already uncovered the special geology of what is now Durham.

Denison Olmsted, while then serving a temporary stint at today’s University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill during hiatus from his career at Yale, had discovered the geologic Deep River basin where Durham is now (not to be confused with today’s surface Deep River.)

That was three years before Durham would be recognized with another name by the postal service and two decades before a not-yet 30 year-old Dr. Bartlett Durham would sell four acres to a new railroad for a station along a new route being laid in 1853 from Charlotte to Raleigh along an old wagon route.

This gave the emerging crossroads the name Durhamville, then Durham Station by the time the Civil War came to its end here 150 years ago next year and finally Durham, absorbing the earlier Pinhook and Prattsburg.

The new track was not finished soon enough to enable the younger Olmsted a visit to Durham as he toured the south incognito on assignment by the then two-year-old NYT.

That would need to wait until his return near the end of his life, when he had become the nationally-recognized founder of the new profession of landscape architect, to layout reforestation and non-ornamental landscape for Biltmore Estate in Asheville.

But he was able visit and comment on Raleigh, then a village of 2,500 people, including observations about its then still existent sense of place.

Traveling down by rail and stagecoach via Gaston, now the namesake for Lake Gaston along the border with Virginia, he also noted that on public conveyances, North Carolina treated slaves much with more respect than other slave far more pretentious states such as Virginia, as well as some abolitionist states.

Even then, a few years before he would create Central Park in New York, Olmsted’s writing, which was published as a book three years later entitled A Journey in the Seaboard States, (1856) reflected a keen eye for the sense of a particular place.

After noting some kind observations of Raleigh such as mansions and tree lined roadways, he writes:

“It is hard to admire what is common; and it is, perhaps, asking too much of the citizens of Raleigh, that they should plant for ornament, or even cause to be retained about such institutions as their Lunatic Asylum, the beautiful evergreens that crowd about the town;”

He’s not taking a cheap shot, just making an observation as he continues about Raleigh’s failure to incorporate groves of trees around facilities:

“but can any man walk from the Capitol oaks to the pine grove, a little beyond the Deaf and Dumb Institution, and say that he would not far rather have the latter than the former to curtain in his habitation?

If he can in summer, let him try it again, as I did, in a soft winter's day, when the evergreens fill the air with a balsamic odor, and the green light comes quivering through them, and the foot falls silently upon the elastic carpet they have spread, deluding one with all the feelings of spring.”

Olmsted’s line – “It is hard to admire what is common; and it is perhaps asking to much of the citizens of Raleigh…” – is true today of the North Carolina General Assembly there which has recently sacrificed thousands of acres of public forests all for the benefit of out of state billboard interests.

The trees, a signature part of North Carolina’s appeal to tourists, including those secretly shopping as potential newcomers and scouts for relocating or expanding businesses, have long been taken for granted in North Carolina.

But why sacrifice them for an obsolete advertising form?

As Columbia Law professor Tim Wu reminds us in his incredible book on the history of communications platforms that in a stage of Joseph Schumpeter’s cycle of innovation there is always “the reluctance of the obsolete to go gently.”

Research now shows that roadside or street side billboards are now used by less than .4% of consumers as “a source where they are likely to learn about products and brands they would like to try or buy” and by only .2% as “influential in purchase decisions.”

Two-tenths of one-percent.

This drops to .1% in the critical 18-35 age group and zero in mine.  The only age group higher is teenagers age 13 to17, where until their brains are fully formed, 3.1% use them, thus the plethora of billboard use to sell them beer, alcohol, and sugary soft drinks.

Ironically, the legislature was pressured internally by members who are car dealers, just as that industry was shifting to online advertising where it now devotes an incredible 40% of all ad dollars, more than any other type of media including television or print.

This is even truer of franchise dealers which now spend 44% of ad dollars online, while every other type of media is in sharp decline.

Once the legislature figures this out and restores trees to their rightful priority, it will take nearly a hundred years for them to grow back to their full potential and restore North Carolina’s appeal.

We didn’t take heed of Olmsted in 1853 when he noted how wonderfully wooded our state was, possibly the first travel writer to note that signature part of North Carolina’s appeal.

We know now that legislators meeting in Raleigh at the time were enabling “boomers and raiders” to clear what would be an average of 13.5 square miles per day nationwide between 1850 and 1910, denuding 50-60% of the state within a decade of Olmsted’s observations.

Obviously, we still aren’t paying heed today.

Even North Carolina cities such as Durham which were farsighted enough to ban billboards in 1984, are still not able to mount a long-needed a “boots on the ground” inventory and assessment crucial to managing its overall tree canopy.

Instead officials settle for telling residents, aghast at its disappearance, to plant shorter trees or cave to another obsolete technology such as above-ground power lines whose enablers suggest hormone injections to make trees grow more slowly.

If he were alive and making another tour, Fredrick Law Olmsted would find a lot of us Tar Heels very slow learners.

Opening Up to Infidels

In my late 20s I developed the habit of reading and listening to a lot of sources with which I didn’t always or even often agree, something that served me well and that readers may detect from time to time in these essays.

The John Locke think tank here in North Carolina has been one of those sources after it was founded just after I was recruited in 1989 to Durham, NC, where I finished the last half of my career.

Ostensibly non-partisan, to me and many others it leans right.

Even though I am a Progressive-leaning Independent, a friend there kiddingly reassured me that “they let in a lot of infidels” when I heard from a public policy scholar I have followed for the past decade or so, that he was slotted to speak this week to that Raleigh-based foundation.

Dr. Heywood Sanders flew into RDU last Sunday for a luncheon speech at the extremely business friendly Locke Foundation.  I couldn’t make it down to Raleigh at his invitation or even to the airport to meet in person due to people here who were picking my brain.

A word about misuse of airport reference before I get into his message.

For readers who think airports are always synonymous with places, Raleigh is a separate metro area east and slightly south of the airport it co-owns with Durham which lies upland and further west.

Located in Morrisville, NC, the name of the airport is misleading because more than 70 years ago, a Raleigh developer hoodwinked a Federal agency into reversing the order of the names in the airport.

I am not sure he was so strategic as to know that pilots, FAA beacons, flight crews and gate agents notoriously truncate the names of shared airports, ultimately confusing visitors, irritating more than half of their passengers and while not intentional, playing favorites.

The Locke Foundation must be credited because researchers there had already noted the complicity of urban businesses and land owners in what Sanders terms “convention  center follies” in his new book by that name, detailing more than a hundred years of public facility development.

Feel free to substitute stadiums, arenas or performing arts centers.

Sanders has been personally defamed by most of my then-peers in community marketing since January 2005 when he published research on the topic at Brookings, a national think tank.

He sounded a warning that Locke researchers also relayed a year later to no avail to policy makers and businesses here in North Carolina.

At the same time, North Carolina tourism expert Dr. Dana Clark at Appalachian State University and a former DMO exec began to publish cautions in tourism journals.

Had they read or listened, Raleigh officials would have saved hundreds of millions of dollars up front and hundreds of millions more downstream and still have achieved the same ratio of convention delegates to overall visitors.

But as one news editorial there put it, officials were consumed with “Charlotte-envy,” a variant of what political science researchers call “ego rent” in studies of elected officials.

But Sanders-vilifying community marketing execs shouldn’t have been surprised except at how detailed his research was taking shape.

Seven years earlier, consultants at ERA had similarly cautioned urban economic development executives in 1998 in a presentation entitled:

“If You Build It, Will They Come?: Stadiums, Arenas and Convention Centers.”

A year before Sanders published his Brookings paper, consultant Ernst & Young wrote a white paper warning cities, community destination marketing organizations, other consultants and urban developers that the supply of convention center space was ignoring the long term decline in demand as early as 1995.

In fact, Sanders had begun publishing studies and making presentations since the early 1980s noting the flawed use of urban infrastructure and the disturbingly opaque combinations formed among elected officials, private property owners and urban development advocates.

Sanders’ specialty after earning a PhD. at Harvard in 1977 has been the politics of urban renewal and revitalization.  One of his early warnings about misuse of public infrastructure is 1984’s “Urban Politics and Local Public Facilities.”

He first sounded warnings about convention centers specifically as early as 1992, each time digging deeper and deeper into reports and public information easily available if so inclined to the mainstream press or to policy makers eager to learn from past miscalculations.

One of his first warnings about convention centers is a classic 1997 white paper published by the Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research, a Massachusetts free market think tank and predecessor to the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina.

Anyone paying attention to data back then, as I happened to be while reviewing some of the very first trend reports on conventions and meetings published in the mid to late-1970s, could see that the emerging decline in demand from conventions and meetings was systemic, not anecdotal.

One or two hotel chain executives even began to remark about the decline in the early 1980s as those meeting facilities gained popularity over convention centers.

Yet the amount of convention center space across the nation skyrocketed from just 7 million s.f. in 1973 as I began my four-decade career in community marketing in Spokane to nearly 15 million by 1989 when I started the last half of my three-city career in Durham.

It had nearly quadrupled by 1995 when Charlotte, NC inexplicably tore down one convention center and opened another five times larger, but destined to only perform on par despite huge subsidies to lure groups.

Raleigh officials had no excuse a decade later when, driven by envy and in part by the sniping they read from a consultant to the Charlotte project, did likewise. 

Even those who did look at the data often made two tragic errors.  They would zoom in too tightly on a timeframe to truly see a long term trend and/or fail to notice that each dip went lower than the last and each rebound peaked lower than the last.

Those anecdotally driven would dismiss this, rationalizing that with  tens of millions in more development, surely their cities could buck the trend, showing projections mysteriously going straight up.

Heywood doesn’t talk from his book in the speech in Raleigh a few days ago but at the request of Locke researchers, filled in part of what a North Carolina chapter would have been.

He uses an illustration in a new update to the Downtown master plan for Raleigh that calls for expansion of its underperforming, heavily subsidized convention center, which is hypothesizing that somehow performance in the future will skyrocket by 18% a year.

Sanders’ study of urban politics and accountability dates back to the 1980s.

His co-edited collection, The Politics of Urban Development, was already a classic when I arrived in Durham in 1989, and the perfect companion to urbanologist Alan Ehrenhalt’s The United States of Ambition published in 1992.

Dr. Sanders’ work is about the misuse of tourism or visitor-centered economic and cultural development such as his presentation in 1998 entitled “A Plethora of Disneylands: The Promise and Politics of Conventions and Tourism.”

Rather than vilifying Sanders, those in my former field of community marketing need to pull their heads out of their cognitive feedback loop where they incessantly mutter among themselves that politicians and supply-side economic developers just don’t get it.

Dr. Sanders is actually making their point.

Except far too many in that profession fail to grasp what point that is.

Everyone thinks they are rationale, enlightened and open-minded but we’re lousy at challenging our own beliefs.

But according to Dr. Jonathan Haidt, fundamentally we are intuitive, not rational.  However, studies show that “forced to reflect for two minutes on a different point of view can make us substantially more tolerant.” 

Try it and then invite Dr. Sanders as a conference speaker.  Even the John Locke Foundation welcomes infidels.

My bet is that one day a new generation of grateful DMO execs will give him a lifetime appreciation award.

Inattention Where It Most Matters

I read the news and I vote.  But frankly like a lot of people, I always end up on voting day finding myself standing there unprepared to make a choice for some offices.

A friend of mine recently pointed me to a solution.  In North Carolina, a non-partisan group, the North Carolina Center for Voter Education has teamed with UNC-TV to provide a website called the 2014 N.C. Voter Guide.

You plug in your address and the website takes you through your ballot, office by office, candidate by candidate with a summary of their background and positions.

At each step you can choose if you like to mark a preference and then at the end you can print out a completed ballot to take with you inside the voting booth.

It is also a place you can go to check your registration, find a polling place and see any new changes to voting requirements.

It is a lot easier to use than other past guides provided by news outlets which turned into something more like homework.

But I also wish there was a way when we vote, to reconsider candidates for whom we voted in the last election who have turned out to be a disappointment, even if just to send them a signal.

I’ve worked very closely, especially with state and local elected officials in my former life.

Sure, a few have been slimy, corrupt and passive aggressively smug in the realization that they won’t be detected behind the image they craft for public and media consumption.

But as a whole, locally elected officials are incredibly hard-working and honorable.

However, there have always been some, who once in office, seem to morph into someone else.  They go undetected even in personal interviews only to become the antitheses, once in office, of what you were led to believe when voting for them.

Maybe it is a case of what political science researchers call the “ego rent” some individuals begin to collect once elected to office.

Bored with executing the mundane policy preferences of constituents, pursuit of “ego rent” is why some start playing political games, making decisions based on incomplete or imbalanced feedback and ultimately fronting for special interests rather than voters.

But unfortunately, elections don’t come with a rescission period like there is for other decisions.

Local and state services represent about 40% of overall government spending and yet state decisions are often driven by officials for which only a few North Carolinians are given a choices.

For example, the horrific changes made a few years ago to clear cut public forestland along roadsides in favor of billboard blight was driven by just 19,381 voters, representing only one of the state’s 100 counties.

That is one of the inherent flaws in representative vs. popular democracy, the former now nearly obsolete.

But there is also growing evidence that as voters, we are far less likely to hold state and local officials accountable, even though they have far more influence over quality of life and the quality of the places we love.

There is also far too little news coverage in local elections.  Most is the superficial “he said, she said” type.  Taking editorial stances does not suffice for in-depth coverage and fact-checking.

For decades too, researchers have measured the bias toward national election coverage noting that in part, it is because it is easier and cheaper to cover.

Adverting simultaneous side-by-side fact-checking is no substitute, especially at the local level, where even cable channels do not reflect voting jurisdictions.

According to analysis by Borrell Associates, politicians and political organizations now spend $37 per eligible voter to sway opinion with media advertising, soon to be $51 in 2016, up 21% from the record setting 2012 Presidential election.

Are we really feeling more informed?  Or are the lies just getting more entertaining?  It is ironic that in the guise of so-called free speech this form is largely exempt from “truth in advertising” requirements.

At the local level, we also don’t have non-partisan, though often ideological, think-tanks making sense of budgets and rarely, okay never, are news outlets inclined or resourced sufficiently to go back through local decisions to analyze and report if the results were ever as claimed.

Voters also have no guarantee that the candidates are invested in the places they seek to represent, since many so-called local offices such as some levels of judges and prosecutors aren’t even required to be residents of the places they serve.

Partisan gerrymandering of districts over the last two decades have also estranged voters from those who are their only hope of representation in the legislature.

It is no wonder so many elections have such little turnout.  I feel patriotic when I vote but many now just don’t see the point.

Websites such as the one I noted at the beginning help.  But the systems needs an overhaul and not just the less than veiled partisan elimination of early voting days and I.D. complications.

Government and public policy has never been more complicated nor the news media less empowered to unwrap it than it is today.

It isn’t much enough to know that the closer government is to the people, the more trust we have in it today.  Even at the local and state level, it is about where it was during the Watergate Era and that isn’t saying much.

A friend of mind once rationalized the flat, dispassionate lack of defense of public policy by rationalizing that voters have a lot of ways to find that out.

Oh really?  Maybe that’s where reform needs to begin.

By making budgets and regulations easier to decipher, by requiring audits and reports on every outcome promised, by making democracy responsive.

Perceiving Sense of Place - Part 2

This essay picks up where I left off yesterday with mention of a pivotal event at the root of Anchorage, Alaska’s unusual sense of urgency about sense of place, something missing from so many much longer established destinations.

But first, for readers new to sense of place, let me try in layman’s terms to explain what that phrase means to me in few paragraphs.

It involves numerous characteristics, that when woven together, reinforce the feel of a particular place.  This is, collectively, what is meant by the term “sense of place.”

Barely a quarter of the way into my four decade career as a community destination marketing exec, I read a new essay by Wallace Stegner that began to connect a lot of dots for me.

But I remain a student and explorer even now in retirement and learn something new about it nearly every day.

The more temporal elements of the sense of a particular place are its soil, geology, terrain, light patterns, wildlife and native vegetation that took shape long before human settlement, even aboriginal.

Long before the nomenclature of place is applied.

Along the continuum of place these are the most real and authentic elements followed by the heritage, culture and values of human inhabitants and then the architecture of the dwellings and buildings being at the more superficial end.

These characteristics need not be entirely unique for it is how distinctively they are manifest when woven together that gives a particular spot a sense of place.

When not the destroyer of sense of place, it is the “built” ingredient that often distinguishes it, not, to paraphrase my favorite architectural author Witold Rybczynski, to “be nostalgic or because history has all the answers.”

But because “freedom from history is no freedom at all.”

Mutual respect by the “built” characteristics across each of the other elements of place, “while linking the past with the present, and seeing the old anew,”  is acknowledgement that “they belong.” That is what  weaves the “sense to a particular place.”

Most visitors, including newcomers, sense it and are drawn to it.  “Stayers” treasure it.  Some people never get it, exposed by their constant dismissiveness of the importance of place.

Anchorage celebrates its first century being designated by that name next year.  It had barely turned 60 when I arrived there.

But what immediately signaled it as a place worthy of love and visitation was that the first public edifice erected was not for performing arts or sports or conventions.

It was a museum to celebrate its local history, values and art.  Erected 10 years before my arrival, it was, in part, to honor the hundredth anniversary of America’s purchase of Alaska from Russia, barely 50 years before that community’s first permanent settlers.

Shown here, its architecture illustrates that lacking the historic architecture of Durham, NC where I have worked/lived ever since, Anchorage’s “built” aspect of sense of place, seeks instead to both open up to and reflect the expansiveness of its setting.

“Stayers” there had first formed an organization as means to preserve artifacts barely forty years after the first settlement, grasping that they tell stories, connect people, capture moments and mark changes.

Anchorage figured all of this out much earlier than most.

In the words of Elaine Gurian, formerly the overseer of what was then all 14 Smithsonian museums, “These objects are the touchstones to bring memories and meanings to life.”

Not coincidentally, a part of the Smithsonian is now embedded in the Anchorage Museum, conducting ongoing research as well as bringing home priceless exhibitions of Alaska artifacts, art and history.

On average, most communities figure out this piece by the time they are 60 years old.  That’s about the stage when the founding generation here in Durham began to treasure and preserve its history.

But it took Durham twice as long as Anchorage to recognize the wisdom of a local history museum, an ambition that is still unfulfilled, or at best, piecemeal.

Instead, despite unparalleled public support for a local history museum over any other cultural facility, for nearly eight more decades in Durham, we’ve left priceless symbols and stories of Durham’s history at risk of being lost forever, while leapfrogging that important step with fantasy and amusement instead.

In the meantime, the Anchorage Museum has already completed its third expansion, two since my decade promoting that community.

What makes that museum even more significant is that it opened just four years after Anchorage was nearly destroyed by a massive earthquake that dropped one side of its main street ten feet lower than the other, liquefying much of a popular neighborhood and closing the International Airport.

At the time, Alaska had only been a state for five years.

This signature natural event sparked a sense of urgency to preserve and tell the Anchorage story so lacking in other much longer established communities.

It also quickened concern across all aspects of sense of place there.

Several weeks before I arrived there in 1978, Nellie Brown died.  In 1912, she and her husband, an American Forest Service ranger, had been dropped off as the first permanent settlers of Anchorage.

Nellie was an Eyak from the Copper River Delta area, east across Prince William Sound around Cordova.  Alaska natives were not given U.S. citizenship for another twelve years, five years after the Anchorage area was withdrawn from the national forest.

Of course, before the Brown’s, there had been humans temporarily inhabiting Anchorage for 6,000 years including seasonal Dena’ina fish camps.  A few Russians had transited by the early 1800s, then by the late 1800s by a handful of transient traders, surveyors and gold miners.

But Nellie’s passing helped me realize just how much had been done to preserve Anchorage’s sense of place in such a short span including the first efforts to set aside park land little more than a decade after settlement.

About 30 years after the first setters, this playful map was created, and by then, Anchorage had already started on what would become four protected forested greenbelts stretching along streams running the Chugach Mountains down to the sea some connecting to a later trail along the coast.

These stretches are home to 200-300 Moose who live year round in the most populated area, joined by another 800-900 during the winter.  Altogether, Anchorage has set aside nearly 14,000 acres this way.

But Moose in the summer are just one of the 52 kinds of mammals including bear, wolves, beaver and Dall sheep.

Anchorage is also home to five salmon species and 230 bird species as well as Marine mammals, including beluga whales, all highly regarded by more than 80% of residents and to visitors as part of the community’s sense of place.

Anchorage was heavily forested before settlement compared to just 30% of Alaska.  Today, 59% of Anchorage remains forested, ranging from nearly 78% in Chugach State Park to 68% overall in other parks.

The canopy in populated areas ranges from 35% overall to 38% in residential areas and just below 10% in commercial areas. Overall the most populated area has lost 50% of its tree cover.

But similar to here in Durham, 97% of Anchorage residents “strongly agree” that forests are important to the community’s quality as a place, more so than any other infrastructure, even education.

Until recently, like Durham, local government there paid attention only to street trees and the property it owns.

But unlike Durham, thanks to grants, Anchorage has completed a comprehensive tree inventory, assessment and management plan covering the entire Municipality.

It notes that it is impossible for municipalities to reach forest canopy objectives let alone preserve this pivotal aspect of sense of place by planting on city property alone.

Anchorage residents are energized in other aspects about preserving its sense of place.  Corridors leading north and south along the Municipality are now parts of two state/national scenic byways

Not only is the community home to a repository of historic aircraft, but citizens have worked hard there to preserve and adaptively reuse a signature part of its more recent past.

When I lived in Durham, I would frequently encounter remnants of two of the three Nike Surface to Air Missile sites deployed during the Cold War.

One in walking distance from my first house when I lived there had been conveyed to Anchorage and converted to Kincaid Park, a heavily forested peninsula that points into Cook Inlet, dividing it into Knik and Turnagain Arms.

One of the bunkers for the missile site there had been converted to an alpine ski chalet.  Another that wasn’t taken out of service until the year after I arrived was visible when silhouetted by moonlight high on a peak in the Chugach Mountains behind Anchorage.

Now it is being preserved as a historical site called Nike Site Summit.

In conclusion, one aspect of Anchorage’s sense of places is art, not just because many artists live there but because its sense of place is so often the subject of their creations, perhaps spurred by the unique patterns of light there.

None has been more prolific than Byron Birdsall, who just created a print to commemorate the Centennial for Anchorage next year (as shown above in this essay.)  I treasure an original watercolor he and Tennys Owens presented me on behalf of the community as I left.

Tennys’ delightful eastern North Carolina accent would be more familiar to me now.  She had founded Artique Ltd. several years before I arrived and became a governing board member of mine, good friend and one of our biggest supporters.

The watercolor they gave me features a beloved old Porsche of mine, which a friend totaled shortly after I arrived in Durham, sitting on the Anchorage shoreline with Cook Inlet and the Alaska Range as as a backdrop.

We had worked with the gallery and with many other local artists over the years to feature their works on the covers of annual Anchorage Visitor Guides which were also framed and given to me that night.

This two-part essay and memoir has been useful, I hope, to those trying to get their heads around the sense of place where they live, if it hasn’t already become extinct that is and accessible only to archeologists.

Sense of Place, once woven, is also extremely fragile.