Eyes on the Skies
I often walk my dog over to a neighborhood called Haddon Hill, which looms over Lake Merritt from the East. It’s a nice neighborhood, with a lot of pretty streets, well-kept properties, and a bit of local history (Henry J. Kaiser, for example, had a large home built for himself which still stands at the corner of Haddon and Hillgirt). It took me a while to notice that there’s another reason why the neighborhood is good for walking: there are no telephone poles or overhead wires. In an area of about 8 or 10 square blocks, all that infrastructure which often clutters our urban and suburban skies are submerged, except for the occasional streetlight. Here is a shot looking one direction from the “dividing line”:
And here is a photo shot from the same location facing the other way:
The neighboring streets, which have wires criss-crossing them every few dozen feet, are still very nice, but once you notice the visual clutter, it starts to seem more offensive. A bit closer to my apartment, here’s a view toward the palm trees of 9th Avenue, which used to form an allee on John “Borax” Smith’s estate. It could be a nice view of a hillside and some trees, if it weren’t for all the obstructions:
I wonder whether anyone has ever studied possible correlations between visual pollution like that, and home values, or crime rates, or residents’ peace of mind. Remarkable research done by a group at the University of Illinois has shown that the presence of greenery in public housing projects is correlated with lower crime, stronger communities, and reduced stress. Could the same be true for all the poles and wires breaking up our views of the skies? When telephone poles were being erected around the country in 1880′s, some locals would cut them down. In 1889 The New York Times ran an article with the headline “War on Telephone Poles,” a title which was borrowed for a recent Harper’s article on the subject (unfortunately, I cannot read it since my subscription to Harper’s lapsed years ago). We laugh at those NIMBYs and luddites now, but were the late-nineteenth century technophobes onto something?
Of all the offensive things that have been done to the American landscape, urban telephone poles and the wires sprouting from them are surely among the least awful, but we’ve become so inured to the depredation of public space that we hardly even notice its features anymore. One of my commenters recently remarked about the dramatic contrast in Los Angeles between its impoverished public sphere and the sumptuous private spaces there. LA is worse than a lot of cities in that regard, but the disconnect exists all over, and blocking our sightlines with a tangle of wires probably doesn’t help.
When we moved from NYC to Mass. those wires on Brookline streets, criss-crossing the sky, really surprised us and were very obtrusive. We had nothing like it in New York. Nor can we recall having seen it in Europe. It is evidently a lot cheaper to have the wiring on the outside. Recently I noticed that condos built in the last 5 years or so have their meters for gas and/ or electricity and water on the outside too, usually at the side of the house, with an occasional fence around it but plainly visible.
As for the beneficial effects of greenery on the inhabitants of even the simplest housing, there is so much that could be done to foster it. (Even without the advantages available to the gardeners of the White House.) As a teenager I spent one year working in a horticultural school and learning about the cycles of growth. It was both absorbing and rewarding — all those red and black currents — despite the war and frequent bombing runs because Continental, a rubber and tire factory, was nearby.
June 27th, 2009 at 4:54 pmGood news! All those annoying poles are going to come down (when dinosaurs like me start using cell phones).
June 28th, 2009 at 3:41 amRiding a bike from west Cambridge to a teaching job in east Cambridge in 1972, I was struck by the steady decrease in trees, ending with essentially nothing, and worried by the effect this had on students. Now I’m going to ride that route again and see if poles and wires increase at the ame rate that green decreases.
June 28th, 2009 at 5:57 amng writes: “…see if poles and wires increase at the same rate that green decreases.”
Some small but not insignificant part of why tree are important in cities must be because they serve to cover up the unsightly poles and wires that would otherwise be bumming people out. When we moved into our house five years ago, I was shocked by the how many poles and wires there were. At first I thought the neighborhood we’d moved from had had all its wiring submerged, but when I went back one day I was amazed to discover that there were just as many wires on our old street; we jus never saw them because they were hidden by the canopy of leaves. We’ve since planted some trees in front of our house, but trees take a long time to grow, and the view out our living room windows is of a cross-beam and an amazing tangle of dozens of wires and cables.
You can see this in your photos, too. The view toward 9th avenue near your house would be much less offensive if there were trees, and the ugly–way view on Haddon Hill would be much improved if the trees that do line the street were growing, not from people’s front yards, but from tree-lawns in the sidewalk, so that their trunks would line up with the telephone poles and their crowns would spread so as to conceal the cross-beams and wires.
Nineteenth century technophobes were smart in many ways. Unfortunately, with all due respect to wordnerd (“all due respect” is a polite way of saying “as little respect as is due to such a misguided proposition”), I’d be surprised if visual pollution improves much in the years to come. Cell phones have only added to the polllution. Almost all technological progress accords with variants of Jevon’s (sp?) paradox, or what Thoreau said about trains; any improvement in mitigating harm only allows us to do more harm. Or what McLuhan said (now confirmed by brain research): all technology is an extension of the body; but it is also, at the same time, though we may not realize it, an amputation.
June 28th, 2009 at 8:05 amThe Jevons Paradox, per Wikipedia: “In economics, the Jevons Paradox (sometimes called the Jevons effect) is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. It is historically called the Jevons Paradox as it ran counter to popular intuition. However, the situation is well understood in modern economics. In addition to reducing the amount needed for a given output, improved efficiency lowers the relative cost of using a resource — which increases demand. Overall resource use increases or decreases depending on which effect predominates.”
June 28th, 2009 at 9:09 amAnyone is welcome to uproot and remove the tree in front of my house tearing up the sidewalk, shedding leaves and twigs 12 months out of 12, shading my little garden and the tree on my property, blocking my view of the park, etc. I am not allowed to do anything to or with it as it belongs to the City of San Francisco. I have been notifying the DPW about the buckling sidewalk, which was just replaced five years ago, but with the current budget I suppose they will wait for a ltrip and fall awsuit from some poor tourist before addressing the problem. I am lucky to have underground utilities, however. May each of you get what you want most in the way of greenery and wire, at least at your own house.
June 29th, 2009 at 3:23 pm