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Urban Dynamics

A Tale of Urban Expansion: Late-19th-Century “Çarʂı” Row Houses, Functional Integration, Street-Life, and Class Mobility

February 5, 2014
Architecture, Bulgaria, Fuji X100 digital, Jews, Public Space, Roma (Gypsies), Sofia, Street Commerce, Urban Dynamics
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Late-19th-century "çarșı"-style row house, Pirotska St., Sofia, Bulgaria, 2014. (Fuji x100). Click on image to enlarge.

Late-19th-century “çarșı”-style row house, Pirotska St., Sofia, Bulgaria, 2014. Note the neo-classical decorative elements and prim domesticity of the curtained windows on the second story and the presence of an Apteka (pharmacy) on the ground floor. (Fuji x100). Click on image to enlarge.

After the founding of an independent Bulgarian kingdom in the aftermath the Russo-Turkish War of the 1870s, the city of Sofia was chosen as the capital of the new nation-state.  The choice of Sofia comprises a tale unto itself.  True to the nation-state model, from day-one newly independent Bulgaria was giddy with dreams of expansion, northward, westward, and southward (to the east, expansion was blocked by the waters the Black Sea).  Sofia, located near Bulgaria’s western border, would be at the country’s epicenter if Bulgaria would succeed in realizing its revanchist “manifest destiny” by expanding westward to the Lake Ohrid and annexing all of Macedonia.

At the time, Sofia had not fully recovered from a heavy earthquake and ensuing epidemics during the first quarter of the nineteenth century.  The city boasted the palatial residence of the former Ottoman governor — soon to be re-purposed as the palace of a monarch recruited from a family of minor German “nobility”– and a main thoroughfare paved with ocher-colored bricks imported from abroad.  For the rest, however, Sofia’s streets were warrens of winding lanes centered around Friday mosques, neighborhood mesjids for daily prayer, churches, wells and fountains.

The first step in creating a self-styled European capital was to sweep away the old Ottoman neighborhood structure and cut a street plan in the western model.  The adopted plan combined a rectilinear street grid with a circular ring road and curving boulevards ala Hausmann’s plan for Paris.  The next step was true to the model of mono-ethnic nation state that Bulgaria was striving to become: “ethnic cleansing.  Gypsies and Jews, the latter comprising a full one-third of Sofia’s population of 10,000 at the time, were forcibly expelled from the city center; Jews to the newly cut parallel streets of  Üç Bunar (“Three Wells)” to the west of downtown Sofia, and Gypsies further outward to the far bank of the Vladaya river, one of several seasonally flooding streams that together formed a moat surrounding the city.

Amongst the new grid of streets cut from Sofia’s main north-south boulevard through the old Ottoman quarter of Sungur and out to Üç Bunar was Pirot, today Pirotska.  The downtown end of Pirotska eventually was lined with European-style apartment houses.  At the Üç Bunar end of Pirotska an older form of architecture still dominates: Two-to-three-story row-houses built in çarʂı (Turkish for “arcade” and “market”) style, with commercial space for shops and craftsmen’s ateliers on the ground floors and family dwellings on the floor(s) above.  Such çarʂı dwellings contributed to the re-shaping of Sofia by spatially integrating the functions of residential streets and  market quarters.  By doing so, they contributed to a culture of urban street life and the emergence of an urban middle- and lower-middle-class and paths to class mobility, both essential elements of democratic nation-building, an imperfect process in Bulgaria to this very day.

The Women’s Market, Sofia, Bulgaria: The Endurance of the 19th Century, Layers of Unwarranted Blame, and the Virtues of Slow Lenses

December 19, 2013
Architecture, Bulgaria, Economics, Faces, Film-based Photography, Jews, Photography, Public Policy, Public Space, Rolleiflex 6x6cm, Roma (Gypsies), Sofia, Street Commerce, Urban Dynamics
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Broom sellers,

Roma broom sellers, Women’s Market, Sofia, Bulgaria, 1997. (Rolleiflex Tessar 𝘧3.5, Tri-X 400ASA, scan of print.) Click on image to enlarge.

Due to the length of this posting, I’ll invert the usual order and begin, rather than end, with a somewhat dry “footnote” on photographic technique; some reflections on the content of the photo — the Women’s Market, Sofia, Bulgaria — follow thereafter …

The Virtues of Slow Lenses

A good number of photographic sites I skim through on the internet betray an out-sized preoccupation with the virtues of fast, wide aperture lenses and their ability to create  narrow planes of focus and patterns of background blur.  As a counter to such, the photo above shows the virtues of slow, narrow-aperture lenses, in this case the 75mm Tessar f3.5, the built-in lens in a second-hand twin-lens Rolleiflex that I bought used more than three decades ago.  The Tessar is one of the simplest designed and lightest weight lenses ever produced but when used properly it is second to none in sharpness, detail, and contrast. The Tessar’s 75mm focal length is a tad wider than 80mm,  the usual “normal” focal length on 6x6cm medium-format film cameras.  This 5mm difference enables the Tessar to deliver slightly wider coverage when used up-close, an advantage in environmental portraiture. The extra 5mm also provides a tad more depth of field and a slight exaggeration in perspective.  The depth of field provided by the Tessar’s maximum aperture of f3.5 reduces the likeliness of focusing errors and keeps background details recognizable.  In the photo above, thus, the main subject is in crisp focus while his wares and female colleague and the pedestrian traffic and architectural features of the market street behind him are sufficiently out of focus so as not to detract from the main subject but still clear enough to provide meaning and context.

Now, on to the subject at hand: the urban dynamics and historical tales the photo reveals …

The Women’s Market, Sofia, Bulgaria

The Women’s Market — located on broad curved street, following the course of a one-time riverbed, just west of the present-day center of Sofia, Bulgaria — has a history that stretches back to the centuries when what is now Bulgaria was part of the Ottoman Empire.  Following Bulgaria’s independence from Ottoman rule in the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish War of the 1870s, the Women’s Market was Sofia’s main retail produce outlet.  Nearly a century later, during the final years of the communist period, the Women’s Market provided a buffer of private enterprise and a reliable source of seasonal produce. Following the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, the Women’s Market remained a chief source of fresh fruit and vegetables in a city in which old distribution systems had collapsed and new ones had not yet formed.  Over the last decade, however, the Market has been in a state of decline.  Supermarkets and shopping malls have taken root throughout Sofia, tastes have changed, and those of the city’s inhabitants with disposable cash and pretensions to mobility have moved from the urban core to the urban periphery taking their purchasing power with them.

In recent years, a large percentage of the Women’s Market’s street stalls have been removed by the municipality. At the moment, new modern multistory stall complexes wishfully described as being built for “tourists” and “artists” are under construction.  What they will look like upon completion and the exact functions they will serve is anyone’s guess.  What remains for now are rows of small enclosed kiosks selling local cheese, cured meats, and fish, plus scores of open fruit and vegetable stands under large brightly painted utilitarian canopies. Each stand is manned by vendors, some morose and silent, others vigorously or halfheartedly hawking their wares.

The endurance of the 19th century

In a lifetime of working in and observing cities in many places throughout the world, I’ve noticed that late-nineteenth century neighborhoods are amongst the last to be regenerated.  This is due in part to the resilient endurance of their economic and social functions during the twentieth century and into the early-twenty-first.  In such neighborhoods, cheap rents and high vacancy rates in storefront occupancy enabled the provision of inexpensive goods to those whose budgets constricted their choices.

The same interstice of factors offers opportunities for marginal entrepreneurship and a shot at mobility to those who might otherwise fall outside of the economy.  The low profit-margins inherent to such entrepreneurship, however, can also make for dubious goods and equally dubious practices.  Thus, shopping in the Women’s Market calls for a taste for sharp-tongued banter and a quick eye ever on the lookout for rigged scales and for good looking produce on display but underweight and damaged goods placed in one’s shopping bag.  Still, where else can one buy, for example, persimmons or grapes, albeit on the last legs of their shelf-lives, for a third of the price of elsewhere and serviceable tomatoes for even far less?

Layers of unwarranted blame

There is a fine ethnic division of work and functions at the Women’s Market.  Meat, cheese, and fish  kiosks and stands offering wild herbs and mushrooms are run by ethnic Bulgarians. Fruit and vegetable stands and peripatetic bootleg cigarette operations are run by Roma (Gypsies).  Storefronts in adjacent streets include honey and bee keeping supply stores run by Bulgarians and rows of “Arab” shops — halal butchers, spice stores, barbers, and low-cost international telephone services — run by and catering to increasing numbers of legal and illegal immigrants from Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Turkey, Central Asia, and Afghanistan. Many Bulgarians, their weak self esteem shakily bolstered by contempt for “others,” blame the shoddier commercial practices of this wonderfully vibrant marginal neighborhood on the presence and “inferiority” of such outsiders.

Several years ago, I attended an open town meeting on the future of the Women’s Market and its surroundings.  The meeting degenerated into hysterical, racist tirades against the presence and practices of Roma stand-holders and market laborers, this despite their being hardworking people trying to extract a semblance of a living from admittedly marginal trade and low-value added labor.  Banish the Gypsies, the sense of the meeting implied, keep the neighborhood “white” and Christian, and the market area with magically become upscale and all will be well.  Not a thought was given to viewing the attempts at entrepreneurship on the part of Roma as social and economic assets to be incubated, this whether out of commitment to equal opportunity or to the  insights of developmental  economists such as Albert O. Hirschman.  The neighborhood’s “Arabs” were denounced with equal rage.

Bulgarians complain that Roma do not work, but when Roma do work and commence to gain economic stability, the majority population reacts vengefully.  Rage and blame have deep roots at the Women’s Market.  On a symbolic level, blame even muddies the market’s name.  During the communist period, the market had been renamed after Georgi Kirkov, an early Bulgarian left-wing trade unionist who died soon after the First World War.  Following the collapse of Soviet-bloc communism, Kirkov’s name was expunged and Kirkov himself anachronistically assigned a share of blame for the mistakes and misdeeds of a neo-Stalist regime that came to power almost three decades after his death.  Today, only a unkempt bust of Kirkov remains, mounted on graffiti-daubed pedestal in a small triangular park in which idle market day-laborers, elderly Roma mostly, congregate to smoke cigarettes, drink cheap alcohol from half-pint bottles, and while away the hours.

Festering blame that has never been resolved

There is another level of blame and contempt, however, that festers under the surface of debates pertaining to the Market.  During the Second World War, the Bulgarian army rounded-up and deported to their death 18,000 Jews from Macedonia and northeastern Greece, areas ceded to Bulgaria by Nazi Germany in reward for favorable trade terms and a lion’s share of Bulgaria’s gold reserves.  At the same time, within the boundaries of the Kingdom of Bulgaria proper, 50,000+ Jews were socially and economically disenfranchised and legally robbed of their real and movable property.  Tens of thousands of Jews were deported from Sofia to the countryside; the younger and fitter male deportees were sent to work as slave laborers on road crews and the rest were left to fend for themselves without means of support in isolated villages. As a boon to ethnic Bulgarians living in Sofia, the deportation freed up hundreds of businesses (most of them marginal), thousands of dwellings in a city short of housing stock, and tens of thousands of places in the workforce.

From the post-war period on, Bulgarians called the seizure of Jewish property and the deportation of Jews from Sofia “The Saving of the Jews,” giving a self-congratulatory spin to the large percentage of Jews in Bulgaria that came through the war alive, something that can be more accurately ascribed to Bulgaria’s being knocked out of the war by the Soviet Union in mid-1944. The reaction of more than 90% of the Jews in the Bulgaria to such a “saving,” was clear enough: emigrate en masse, mostly to Israel, not long after the war ended.  Prior to the war, Sofia’s Jews had formed the bulk of the residents of the market quarter.  Their  deportation and post-war emigration created a vacuum in the midst of the city’s center and led to discontinuities and dislocations from which the streets surrounding the Women’s Market have yet to recover.

Rag-sellers, “çıfıtcı,” and voting with my wallet

Today, in a country almost without Jews, Jews remain an obsession for many Bulgarians and a target of their hostility and condescension.  This especially holds true for populist agitators and amongst Bulgarians with higher incomes and social standing, whether real or self-ascribed.  In such circles, Jews are blamed for communism and for capitalism and for imagined secret cabals that subvert Bulgaria and steer the world.  The poisonous, fraudulent “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” remains a best-seller at outdoor book stalls in Sofia, as do conspiracy theory books involving Israel’s Mossad.  Walls are daubed with antisemitic (and anti-Roma and anti-Turkish) slogans, the work of bands of neo-fascist football (soccer) supporters.  Few social gatherings of upper-income or self-styledly cultured Bulgarians are complete without the telling of “yevreiski vitsovi” (“Jewish jokes”) — jokes about Jews rather than by them, usually with story lines about rich but stupid Jews outsmarting themselves in avaricious schemes.

In truth, prior to the Second World War, most Jews in Bulgaria were marginal shopkeepers and low-income craftsmen, laborers, and peddlers. Like today’s Roma, Jews were blamed for the inherent defects of the economic niches in which they labored and the social niches in which they lived.  Early in the twentieth century, many Sofia Jews were old-clothes and rag vendors, literally, thus, members of the “lumpenproletariat.” To this day, in Bulgaria, Jews — be they doctors, scholars, merchants, or ordinary folks like this writer — are contemptuously referred to as “chifuti,” a Bulgarian-language bastardization of the Turkish term “çıfıtcı” or old-clothes- and rag-seller.  Personally, as someone who has worked for others since my 13th year, and whose roots are in a world not dissimilar to the that of the Women’s Market, I am quite willing to wear the label of “çıfıtcı“with pride.  For this reason, when in Sofia, I happily continue to  do my shopping in and around the Women’s Market and loyally patronize its Roma vendors …  this regardless of any and all bruised and overripe fruit or real or imagined thumbs on scales!  As to antisemitic, anti-Roma , anti-worker “cultured” Bulgarians, as we used to say in the Yiddish-English patois of my native Lower East Side of Manhattan: “Geh’n’d’r’ert!” (“Sink into the ground”).  After years of listening to their racist hatefulness  and class-condescension of , I’m always available to lend a helpful push.

Sofia Rooftops: One View, Several Stories

December 1, 2013
Architecture, Bulgaria, Fuji X100 digital, Sofia, Urban Dynamics
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View from my desk at sunrise, Sofia, Bulgaria, winter 2011-2012. (Fuji X100). Click to enlarge.

Sofia, Bulgaria, view from my desk at sunrise on a December morning, 2011.  (Fuji X100) Click to enlarge.

The image above shows the view from the desk I have been using during my stays in Sofia, Bulgaria over the last seventeen years.  For nearly two decades, the view has barely changed. The building on the far left received a coat of yellow paint some years ago, a window was cut into the roof of the building at the foreground and a birch tree that stood to the building’s left was felled during a storm.  However, the sensation I experience each time I glance out the window has remained constant — a feeling of floating above the city encased in a my own private bubble.

Even banal views belie tales of change. The above panorama of sky, roof tiles, distant trees, and the upper floors of Bauhaus-influenced facades may have remained fixed but life on the streets three stories below has gone through upheavals.  Competing political regimes and severe economic crisis have come and gone, Sofia’s population has increased 2.5x, a new generation of Sofia residents has been born and grown to near-adulthood, and the bulk of the economic and social lives of the city have moved out of the center to new areas at the urban periphery.

Seventy years ago, some of the rooftops in this very view were aflame during wartime aerial bombardments of Sofia. (Bulgaria, not to forget, was an enthusiastic ally of Nazi Germany and was fire-bombed by the British and Americans in reprisal, a matter cynically relegated to amnesia during both the Soviet- and post-Soviet eras).

During the years that the view above has been mine to enjoy, the building in the foreground has gone through several incarnations, all reflective of changes in the city at large. Soon after the denouement of the Communist period, during a time of unregulated gangster-capitalism, the building housed the offices of Bulgaria’s first GSM mobile telecommunications provider, initially owned by a succession of Russian and Israeli investors backed by dubious sources of capital.  Not long after, during a period of foreign largesse and a cargo-cult of NGO boondoggles, the building housed the Bulgarian representation of the United Nations Development Program.  Thereafter, the building remained vacant for some years until, this past month, it was refurbished to house private law offices.

Just as the view from my desk in Sofia points to stories of external changes, it also reveals changes in the viewer.  Over the years that I have used the desk, I’ve been in and out of Sofia as a mid-life Fulbright research scholar and photographer,  a convalescent and physical therapy patient following a severe accident,  a field worker for a US government project documenting aspects of the cultural heritage of ethnic and religious minorities, and  a consultant to various companies and institutions in Western and Central Europe. These last few months, I’ve been in Sofia for  time-consuming dental work, itself a revealing tale of sugar-laden, post-war American diet, prohibitively priced US dentistry, inadequate Western and Eastern European dentistry in the 1970s and 80s, past accidents, and poor luck at the roulette table of genetics.  I hope to be able to leave Sofia by mid-month — when I do, the memory of the view from my desk will travel with me.

An Archway in Tarlebaşı, Istanbul: Orientalism in the Orient, a Statement of Occidental Identity?

November 26, 2013
Architecture, Fuji X100 digital, Identities and Traditions, Istanbul, Turkey, Urban Dynamics
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An archway at the entrance of a tenement in the Tarlebaşı quarter of Istanbul, 2012. (Fuji X100) Click to enlarge.

An archway at the entrance of a tenement in the lower reaches of the Tarlebaşı quarter of Istanbul, 2012. (Fuji X100) Click to enlarge.

The streets sloping downward from the north side of present-day Istiklal Caddessi to Dolapdere Bulvari in the valley below are dense with late-19th- and early-20th-century tenements and apartment houses. Most are in disrepair but many have recently been restored as the area begins to undergo the preservationist benefits and human dislocations of gentrification and discovery by “cool” young westerners some oblivious of the lives of their neighbors and some enthralled by the seeming “romance” of the poverty … of others.

The area was built up in the late 19th century by Istanbul Christians, Greeks mostly.  It underwent a major demographic change following government-fomented anti-minority pogroms in 1956.  With the forced exit of Greeks, the neighborhood became a haven for the traditional inner city poor and recent arrivals from rural areas: Turkish Sunnis, Kurds, Alevis, and Roma.  The process of ghettoization was completed in the 1960s by the cutting of Tarlebaşı Bulvari, a multi-laned thoroughfare that served as a wall isolating streets immediately adjacent to Istiklal from those on the slope below.

A relationship between typology and geography  characterizes the area’s architecture.  As a rule of thumb, the closer to Istiklal, the larger the plot and grander the structure; the closer to Dolapdere, the smaller the plot and more modest the house.  The neighborhood’s apartment houses tend to be situated on the broader streets and its tenement row houses in smaller streets and alleyways. The closer to Dolapdere, the fewer and more modest the architectural decorative elements.  This makes the archway in the photo above all the more curious.

The archway above shows no relation to Ottoman styles nor to the geometric motifs of Anatolian Greek towns and villages.  In one way, it appears to be a fantasy interpretation of Mogul architecture.  More likely, given the time and the place, it might have been inspired by the so-called Moorish Revival style that arose in the Austro-Hungarian Empire following the Hapsburg annexation of Bosnia Herzegovina or, equally likely, by the eastern-influenced motifs of northern European Art Nouveau and Jugendstil.  By incorporating an ornament inspired by the popular European orientalist fantasies of the time, could the Greek owner or builder of the house in question have been trying to assert his own modernity and self-styled occidental individual identity, this at a time of when Ottoman Christians were focused on national independence ala European nation-states?

More on this theme in subsequent posts…

Mattresses, Brooms, and Art in Bulk, Tahtakale, Istanbul: Street Commerce Direct and Unadorned

November 18, 2013
Fuji X100 digital, Istanbul, Street Commerce, Turkey, Urban Dynamics
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Mattresses for sale, Tahtakale, Eminönü, Istanbul, 2012. (Fuji X100). Click to enlarge.

Mattresses for sale, Tahtakale quarter, Eminönü, Istanbul, 2012. (Fuji X100). Click to enlarge.

Exit Istanbul’s famed Egyptian Spice Market in the direction of the mosque of Rüstem Paşa and the neighborhood of Tahtakale and one passes through a narrow street filled with slow moving crowds of tourists and local shoppers from throughout the city.  The first few hundred meters of the street is lined with scores of shops selling fresh ground coffee, nuts and dried fruit, followed by stalls and workshops stocked with traditional wooden and metal kitchenware and folding tables, baskets, and other accoutrements de rigueur for street vendors.  Continue further in the direction of Unkapani and the crowds thin out and the goods in the shops and stalls become more prosaic and spartan, necessities geared to the mundane needs of low income shoppers from the immediate surroundings.  Artifice is absent, goods are displayed matter-of-factly — neither display windows nor vicarious seduction, no hawkers, just commerce at its most direct and unadorned.

Left: The wares of a broom seller with matching façade. Right: Affordable art. Tahtakale, Eminönü, Istanbul, 2012. (Fuji X100). Click to enlarge.

Left: The wares of a broom seller with façade painted to match. Right: Affordable art. Tahtakale, Eminönü, Istanbul, 2012. (Fuji X100). Click to enlarge.

 

Eminönü Waterfront, Istanbul: Invented Traditions, Pickles in Cups, Grilled Mackerel Sandwiches, and the Pitfalls of Nostalgia

November 15, 2013
Fuji X100 digital, Identities and Traditions, Istanbul, Public Space, Street Commerce, Turkey, Urban Dynamics
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Pickle and pickle-juice vendor with stand prepared for the evening's trade, Eminönü, Istanbul, 2012. (Fuji X100). Click to enlarge.

Pickle and pickle-juice vendor with wares prepared  in advanced for the evening’s trade, Shore-front of the Golden Horn, Eminönü, Istanbul, 2012. (Fuji X100). Click to enlarge.

Invented Traditions

Over the last fifteen years or so, I’ve leisurely waded through the canon literature of the study of the emergence and solidification of nations and national identities: Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Eric Hobsbawm’s Invented Traditions, Pierre Nora’s five-volume study of the national memory of France, Patrick Geary”s The Myth of Nations, and, most recently,  Timothy Snyder’s powerful studies of identity and hegemony in Eastern Europe (Reconstructed Nations, Bloodlands, etc.), works that illuminate the translation of contrived national identities into viciously exclusionary and expansionist nation states.

A by-product of this reading is the realization that most “national” traditions — be they architectural, musical, dance, culinary, sartorial, folkloric, etc. — are either blatantly invented or appropriated from  traditions shared in common with neighboring peoples in an attempt to establish the legitimacy and hegemony of one’s own group at the expense the identity and power of others.  Invariably, such traditions are posited as being products of an imagined national “golden age.”

Pickles and Mackerel

So, what does the disquisition above have to do with pickles and grilled mackerel in Istanbul?

First, note  the costume worn by the pickle vendor in the photo at the top of this post:  a) an imitation fez made of cheap velvet rather than traditional wool felt, and emblazoned with the Turkish national crescent and star and with a stylized tulip, the latter a logo thought up for Turkey’s national tourism authority by a PR or “branding” agency; b) a mass produced embroidered vest of the sort sold to tourists in souvenir shops and bought in bulk by amateur folk-dance troupes; and c) a brightly colored waistband over wide pantaloons (the latter not visible in the photo).

A decade ago, the very same vendors dressed in normal street or work clothes and the carts from which they were sold were simple affairs of glass panes and unfinished or laminated wood.

At the water's edge: Neon-lit canopied faux-traditional caiques, floating kitchens preparing and serving grilled mackerel sandwiches to passersby. In the foreground, an angler in search for his own dinner. Illuminated in the far distance, the Süleymaniye, the mosque complex of Sultan Süleyman the Law-Giver ("Suleiman the Magnificent"), a master-work of the 16th-century architect Mimar Sinan. Galata Bridge, Istanbul, 2011. (Fuji X100). Click to enlarge.

Mid-distance at the water’s edge: Neon- and lcd-lit, faux-traditional, canopied launches — floating, wave-tossed kitchens grilling and serving  to passersby mackerel sandwiches garnished with lettuce and onions. In the foreground, an angler in search of his own fish dinner. Illuminated in the  distance, the Süleymaniye, the mosque complex of Sultan Süleyman the Law-Giver (“Suleiman the Magnificent”), a master-work of 16th-century architect Mimar Sinan. Galata Bridge looking across the mouth of the Golden Horn towards Eminönü, Istanbul, 2011. (Fuji X100). Click to enlarge.

Second, note the boats of grilled mackerel vendors moored at mid-distance in the second photo above.  The boats are topped with canopies in the shape of stylized fantasy imitations of those that once adorned the excursion launches of the Ottoman elite — with the addition of multicolored neon and incandescent lighting.  A decade ago, such boats were plain wooden skiffs with simple canvas or plywood roofs to block seasonal sun and rain.

I don’t remember exactly in which year this “make-over”of pickle vendors and mackerel boats occurred, nor am I certain why and at whose behest.  My guess is that it was mandated by the local district municipality or by the tourism functionaries of the municipality Istanbul.  More interesting is why ….

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Waterside Commerce, Istanbul: Flower Vendor with Coat to Match

November 7, 2013
Faces, Fuji X100 digital, Istanbul, Roma (Gypsies), Street Commerce, Turkey, Urban Dynamics
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Galata Bridge, Istanbul Turkey, 2012. (Fuji X100) Click to enlarge.

Flower Vendor, Galata Bridge, Istanbul Turkey, December, 2011. In the background to the right: a few of the ubiquitous amateur anglers who line railings of the bridge year-round in expectation of an evening’s meal. (Fuji X100.) Click to enlarge.

The red flowers are kokina çiçeği. Kokina is a Turkish loan word from the Greek kokinos, meaning “red.”  In Istanbul kokina çiçeği are sold as New Years decorations, a custom borrowed from the city’s once-large and vibrant ethnic Greek population.  Botany is not my strong suit, but to me kokina çiçeği resemble a variety of mistletoe — not only in their appearance but also in their function as mid-winter talismans. In many ancient cultures, mistletoe varieties — especially those parasitic to oak — were associated with virility, fertility, and regeneration, part of the reason why, in the Anglo-Saxon world, men and women who pass together under Christmas-season mistletoe traditionally were compelled to kiss. Mistletoe may also have been the “golden bough” that Aeneas took with him as a placating gift on his trip to the underworld and, thus, the inspiration from which Sir James George Frazer’s took the name for his famed late-19th- early-20th-century study of myth land legend.  The flower seller, by the way, is an Istanbul Rom (Gypsy).  In much of southeast Europe, urban Roma labor long hours in the ornamental flower trade, as street vendors and, less visible to the casual stroller, as wholesalers as well.  Central and Eastern Europeans who accuse Roma of willful unemployment are blind to the those who labor at the base of the pyramid of urban economic activities.

Technical footnote…

When processing the raw file of this photo in Lightroom, I couldn’t resist the temptation to nudge the red-saturation slider slightly rightwards!

Waterside Commerce, Istanbul: Cotton Candy Vendor At Day’s End

November 6, 2013
Economics, Fuji X100 digital, Istanbul, Photography, Public Policy, Street Commerce, Turkey, Urban Dynamics
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Cotton candy and toffee vendor at day's end. Uskudar, Istanbul, Turkey, 2013. (Fuji X100.) Click to enlarge.

Almost sold out! Cotton candy and toffee vendor hastening home at day’s end. Ferry landing, Uskudar, Istanbul, Turkey, 2013. (Fuji X100, manually zone-focused while walking.) Click to enlarge.

Please indulge me while I repeat in short what most of us know quite well at length …

The last third of the 20th century saw the rise and flourishing  of socialism for the rich, generously financed by the taxes of those in the middle and working classes.  From America’s infamous Lockheed bailout in the 1970s to the billions of dollars in public funds poured into the craws of General Motors and banks “to big to fail” in the aftermath of the world financial implosion of 2008, large enterprises have been saved by funds cannibalized away from the expenditures on infrastructure and human resources on which our futures depend.  Small enterprises and individuals, on the other hand, are allowed to go under.  In Western Europe, semi-governmental lending institutions provide established companies with capital o expand and  commence new ventures.  Any one else who wants to obtain  capital and buy time to go “entrepreneurial” is left to their own devices and fed 19th-century platitudes about self-reliance and free markets. 

And now a few words about the photograph …

The photograph above shows a familiar presence in Istanbul: the wandering cotton candy vendor. His capital: a long pole, a box of pushpins, and a will to walk the parks and promenades of the city from dawn to dusk.   His stock: a few dozen bouquets of spun-sugar “cotton candy” and a few score cellophane bags of cheap toffee.  His income: minimal.  But the uncontrolled economic chaos of Istanbul at least gives him a chance to earn something.  In the US, he would be checked for his pedlar’s license, inspected for hygiene, and arrested for loitering if he stood still.  In Western Europe, he would have to follow months-long mandatory courses in retailing and management.  And, wherever he worked, if and when things went bad, he would be deemed “too small to be saved.”

A technical footnote …

One of the obsessions of many internet photography weblogs is the micro-second differences between automatic and manual focusing speeds of different makes and models of digital cameras. The photo above was taken using a notoriously “slow-focusing” camera — the Fuji X100 — by “zone-focusing” in advance in manual mode just as the vendor and I were approaching one another at a brisk pace.  Slow compared to cameras used by sports and wildlife photographers, most certainly, but no slower than my 1960s twin-lens Rolleis!

Surfaces At The Urban Edge, Coney Island-Brighton Beach: “Let Them Walk On Concrete”

November 1, 2013
Brooklyn, Fuji X100 digital, Infrastructure, New York, Public Policy, Public Space, Urban Dynamics
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An infrastructural question: Will seaside boardwalks survive the 21st century?

A look at the New York region suggests that they might not.  The resurgence of nature over urban artifice during last year’s Hurricane Sandy revealed anew the importance of regeneration and/or conservancy of natural coastlines.  The flooding that devastated nearby Long Beach on the south shore of Long Island, for example, would have been avoided or minimized had natural sand dunes still been in place that were removed early in the twentieth century to clear the way for apartments with oceanside frontage and the construction of a magnificent miles-long boardwalk promenade.  This year’s fire to the south of New York City on New Jersey’s Atlantic shore owed its rapid spread to the very materials that give boardwalks their name: wood-plank paving.   And, yet, boardwalks remain urban necessities.

Shuttered monument to a forgotten Brooklyn politician: Abe Stark Sport Center, Boardwalk, Coney Island-Brighton Beach, 2011. (Fuji X100)

Shuttered monument to a forgotten Brooklyn politician: Abe Stark Sport Center, Boardwalk, Coney Island-Brighton Beach, 2011.(Fuji X100.)  In the foreground: the characteristic herringbone wood planking of New York City boardwalks and a lone dented trash barrel painted in the signature green of the NYC Dept. of Parks.

From fashion to survival

Boardwalks are products of the interstice of 19th-century romanticism and 19th-century urbanity, in which nature was a picturesque backdrop to be seen but not touched, to be witnessed — but with dry and unsoiled shoes — from the safety and elegance of seaside promenades and beach-front hotels and restaurants. In the context of the lives of millions of ordinary New Yorkers — this writer and two generations of his forebears included — the boardwalk at Coney Island was and remains central to urban survival.   Like Manhattan’s Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, the Coney Island boardwalk from Brighton Beach past Coney Island to Seagate gives New Yorkers who lack the means to vacation or to travel afar access to fresh air and a refuge from urban congestion and searing summer heat.

Outlets to the sea

The Coney Island boardwalk was built ninety years ago, a time when the farmlands of Brooklyn were being paved over en masse for the construction of seemingly endless expanses of working- and lower-middle-class apartments for immigrants and their children fleeing cramped, degrading housing conditions in lower Manhattan.  Their flight followed the paths of newly built subways lines, trajectories that gave also gave shape to the schemes of real estate speculators.   The continuation of subway lines to the seaside, and thus to Coney Island, afforded the urban working poor an easy outlet to the beach and to walks and leisurely socializing on surfaces less oppressive than urban concrete, and to sounds less intrusive than the ever-present rattling of horse carts and, later, the roar of automobiles.

Changing numbers, changing faces

Over the last century, usage of the Coney Island boardwalk has fluctuated in parallel with the fortunes and changing demographics of its immediate hinterland.  (A lengthy subject that I will save for future posts.)  The apogee of the boardwalk’s crowds and popularity was in the 1930s and early 1940s.  A decline set in after the Second World War and continued through 1970s.  A revival was sparked in the late-1970s, in part by the settlement in Brighton Beach of tens of thousands of mostly Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union.  Over the past decades, the faces seen, and accents and languages heard, along the boardwalk have changed from those of Jews, Irish, and Italians — once amongst the dominant ethnic groups in New York — to those of African-Americans, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, Russians, Central Asians, Indians, Pakistanis, Mexicans, and Chinese.  What has remained constant is the precarious place of boardwalk denizens towards the lower rungs of New York City’s housing and economy.

From infrastructure to serendipity

During the 1930s and early-40s, under President Roosevelt’s New Deal and the mayor-ship of Fiorello LaGuardia, investment in and maintenance of public infrastructure, both physical and social, was seen as a core task of government – – a means for collectively facilitating the lives and advancement of all individuals comprising our society and, not least, ensuring social peace in the process.  Parks, beaches, and boardwalks included, were parts of the mix.

America's shoreline: John"s Italian Ices and a tattered US flag. Sunset at the Coney Island Boardwalk, 2011. (Fuji X100)

America’s shoreline: John”s Italian Ices and a tattered US flag. Sunset at the Coney Island Boardwalk, 2011. (Fuji X100)

“Fast forward” to the years of New York as financial center and the Bloomberg years, the age of a real-estate-development-driven economy, increasing unequal distribution of wealth, and “Manhattanization” (a new phrase coined to describe the phenomenon of a economically and demographically variegated city or part thereof suddenly turning into a preserve of those at the upper income levels, this a la the fate of much of Manhattan since the start of the millennium).

Over the last decade, social and physical infrastructure and their maintenance are increasingly surrendered to private enterprises or left to the serendipitous voluntarism of “public private partnerships.”   One of the results has been the filleting of the public funds for parks maintenance and the establishment in place thereof of “public-private partnerships” in the form of “conservancies” linked to individual properties.  The outcome has been predictable.  Manhattan’s Central Park, the city’s highest profile park facility, flanked by three of New York’s wealthiest district is governed and funded by a conservation with an immense endowment and budget.  Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Conservancy struggles to cover costs and many of the parks facilities still dependent on filleted public funds languish.

“Let them walk on concrete:”

Wood paved boardwalks splinter, warp, and rot, they are maintenance intensive and require periodic resurfacing.  In the spirit of Marie Antoinette advising the bread-starved poor of pre-revolutionary Paris  “… let them eat cake,”  the Bloomberg era’s prescription for the patrons of the Brighton Beach-Coney Island boardwalk appeared to be: “… let them walk on concrete.”   A couple of years ago, large sections of the boardwalk surface were stripped of their wood and replaced by prefabricated modular sections of light-colored concrete with surfaces crudely textured to give the impression of wood grain.  The modular sections were poorly leveled and sloppily abutted.

The immediate reaction?  Small crowds of boardwalk denizens gathered in amazement and  Read More

Dancing At The Urban Edge: Coney Island Weekend Afternoons

September 6, 2013
Brooklyn, Dance, Faces, Fuji X100 digital, New York, Public Space, Urban Dynamics
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Dancers at a weekend afternoon dance party, Coney Island Boardwalk, Brooklyn, New York, 2012. (Fuji X100 w/28mm-equivalant lens adapter). Click to enlarge.

Weekend afternoon dance party, Coney Island Boardwalk, Brooklyn, New York, 2012. (Fuji X100 w/ 28mm-equivalent lens adapter). Click to enlarge.

I haven’t gotten out to Coney Island this summer.  So, offhand, I don’t know the state of the famed Coney Island-Brighton Beach seaside boardwalk post-Hurricane Sandy.  What I do know is that I very much miss dancing on Coney Island boardwalk in the breeze and fading light of weekend summer afternoons.

For the last couple of decades, impromptu dances set to the blare of portable sound systems and music decks manned by proprietors and patrons of boardwalk bars attract a crowd of dancers representative of New Yorkers to whom Coney Island is the only affordable and accessible seaside respite from the thick air, stuffy apartments, and burning pavements of summer time New York.  (This despite the efforts of former mayor Giuliani to expunge such offenses against “quality of life” and of soon-to-be-former mayor Bloomberg to sanitize, gentrify, and recycle neighborhoods and public space for the benefit of those with high incomes and volumes of disposal cash.)

Most Coney Island boardwalk dancers are urban survivors, people who’ve made it through the scourges of low-paying jobs or lives at the edge.  The music is mostly Afro-Caribbean, Latin, and fusion.  The price of a ticket is no more than a lack of pretension and a desire and ability to dance.

These last years, I’d gravitated more and more towards to weekend dances on the boardwalk.  The grit of the edge of the city is more redolent of the New York that shaped me, and the boardwalk venue is far more familiar, accessible, and welcoming to me than are stylish clubs in upper income Manhattan or in the ethnically-purged, middle-American “hipster” neighborhoods that now sprawl across the north of Brooklyn. Not least, the subtle flexibility and responsiveness of the boardwalk’s wood plank surface add spring and an intoxicating feeling of (seeming) virtuosity to one’s every step.

More Coney Island dancers! (Specifications as per photo above) Click to enlarge.

More Coney Island dancers. (Specifications as per photo above) Click to enlarge.

Technical Footnote

On the X100, the  optical imperfections (softness, flare, and color casts) of Fuji’s 28mm-equivalent screw-in wide angle adaptor helped rather than hinder portrayal of a Coney Island weekend afternoon.