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Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. His latest project is recovering a stolen necklace, which carries with it an ancient curse that may unleash a horde of.
A Forest of Stars. A Forest of Stars by Kevin J. Horizon Storms by Kevin J. Hidden Empire by Kevin J. Metal Swarm by Kevin J. Scattered Suns by Kevin J. Of Fire and Night by Kevin J. The Martian War by Kevin J. The Ashes of Worlds by Kevin J. The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Eternity s Mind by Kevin J. All the Rage by F. Paul Wilson. But the general environ- catches a glimpse of the fenced, open square, with its round, cen- ment was persistently referred to with the words "old," "dirty," tral bandstand, and the surrounding benches.
Figure 13 "drab. Most striking was the strong ness to me. Take the following part of a trip descrip- gen Avenue. I mean, sometimes you can't decide which avenue tion in a familiar area, as an example: you want to go on, because they're more or less just the same; there's nothing to differentiate them.
After you cross the highway, there's a going-up bridge; and after you come under the bridge, the first Street you get to, there's How would I recognize Fairview Avenue when I come to it?
A Street in Jersey City next corner, there's a radio store and a hardware store right close together on your right. On your left, before you cross the street, is a grocery store and a cleaner. You come on up to 7th Street, and on 7th Street is a saloon facing you on the lefthand corner, a vegetable market on the righthand — a liquor score on the right side of the road, on the left is a grocery store. The next street is 6th Street; there's no landmark except that you come under the railroad again.
When you go under the railroad, the next street is 5th. On your right is a saloon; there's a new fill- ing station across the street on your right; there is a saloon on the left. The next is 3rd — you come up to 3rd and see a drugstore on your right, whiskey store across from you on the right; on the left is a grocery store and a saloon on your left across from the grocery store. The next is 2nd, and there's a grocery store on the left and a saloon on the left across from it.
On your right, before you cross the street, there's a place where they sell household appliances, and then 1st Street, there's a butcher shop, meat market on the left and across from it is a vacant lot that's used for a parking lot, on your right is a clothing store and a candy store on the right.
It's the only way you can recognize any As the core of a metropolis, central Los Angeles is heavily street in this city. There's nothing distinctive, just another charged with meaning and activity, with large and presumably apartment house, that's all, on the corner. Yet a number of factors operate to result in a I chink we usually find our way around. Where there's a will different, and less sharp, image than that of Boston.
First is the there's a way. It's confusing at times, you may lose some minutes in trying to And a place, but I think eventually you get where decentralization of the metropolitan region, whereby the central you want to go to. The central area has In this relatively undifferentiated environment there is a reli- intensive shopping, but it is no longer the best shopping, and ance not only an use-locations, but frequently on gradients of use, great numbers of citizens never enter the downtown area from or of the relative state of repair of structures.
The street signs, one year to the next. Second, the grid pattern itself is an undif- the big advertising signs of Journal Square, and the factories are ferentiated matrix, within which elements cannot always be the landmarks. Any landscaped open spaces, such as Hamilton located with confidence. Third, the central activities are spatially or Van Vorst Parks, or especially the large West Side Park, are extended and shifting, a fact which dilutes their impact.
Fre- cherished. On two occasions, people used tiny grass triangles at certain street intersections as landmarks. Another woman spoke of driving over to a small park on a Sunday, so that she could sit FlG.
The visual form of Los Angela as seen in the field in the car and look at it. The fact that the Medical Center has a small landscaped plot in front of it seems to be as important an identifying characteristic as its great bulk and skyline silhou- ette. The evident low imageability of this environment was reflected in the image held even by its long-time residents, and was manifested in dissatisfaction, poor orientation, and an ina- bility to describe or differentiate its parts.
Yet even such a seemingly chaotic set of surroundings does in fact have some pat- tern, and people seize upon and elaborate this pattern by concen- tration on minor clues, as well as by shifting their attention from physical appearance to other aspects. Los Angeles The Los Angeles area, the heart of a great metropolitan region, presents a different picture, and one quite different from Boston as well.
The area, while comparable in size to the Boston and Jersey City zones, includes little more than the central business district and its fringes.
The subjects were familiar with the area, not through residence, but by reasons of work place in one Figure 14 of the central offices or stores. Figure 14 presents the field recon- naissance in the usual manner. The Hollywood and Harbor Freeways may be recog- nised as bounding the two open sides of the L The general Image is remarkable for its emptiness east of Main or Los Ange- les Streets, and south of 7th Street, except for the extension of the repeating grid.
The central area is set in a vacuum. This L-shaped center is liberally sprinkled with remembered land- Figure 43, page marks, chief of them being the Statler and Biltmore Hotels, and then, among others, the Richfield Building, the Public Library, Robinsons and Bullocks department stores, the Federal Savings Building, the Philharmonic auditorium, City Hall, and the Union Depot.
But only two landmarks were described in any concrete detail: the ugly, black and gold Richfield Building and the pyra- mided top of the City Hall. Las Angeles from the west quent rebuilding prevents the identification that builds up by historical process.
The elements themselves, despite and some- times because of frequent attempts at flamboyance, are often visually faceless. Nevertheless, we are not now looking at another chaotic Jersey City, but rather at the active and ecologi- cally ordered center of a great metropolis. The accompanying aerial photograph gives an impression of Figure 15 this scene. Except by minute attention to plant types, or to the distant background, it would be hard to distinguish this from the center of many U.
There is the same piling-up of blank office structures, the same ubiquity of traffic ways and parking lots. The image maps, however, are much more dense than those of Jersey City. The essential structure of this image is the nodal point of Per- shing Square, which lies in the crook of the L formed by two shopping streets, Broadway and 7th Street.
All this is in the gen- eral matrix of a grid of paths. At the far end of Broadway is the Civic Center area, and beyond that the sentimentally important node of the Plaza-Olvera Street. Along with the Plaza-Olvera Street node Figure 1 7 involving another open space , Pershing Square was the most sharply described element, with its immaculate central lawn, fringed first by banana trees, then by a ring of old people sitting in solid ranks on the stone walls, then by busy streets, and finally by the close files of downtown buildings.
Although remarkable, it was not always felt to be pleasant. Sometimes subjects showed fear of the old and eccentric people who use it; more often the response was one of pathos, heightened by the way in which these people are confined to the fringing walls, and kept off the cen- tral grass. Unfavorable comparisons were drawn with the earlier, if dowdier, aspect of the Square: a grove of trees, with scattered benches and walks.
The central grass was resented not only be- cause of its denial to the park loungers, but because it makes it impossible to cut across the space, as a pedestrian would normally do. Nevertheless, this is a highly identifiable image, strength- ened by the presence of a dominant landmark, the red-brown mass of the Biltmore Hotel, which efficiently orients the direction of the Square.
For all its importance in the city image, Pershing Square seems to float a little. It is one block away from the two key streets, FIG. Persbing Square 7th and Broadway, and many were uncertain of its precise loca- tion, although sure of its general one. Subjects on their trips Other than the Civic Center area, recognizable districts are tended in their minds to peer sideways for it, as they passed each either small and linear, confined to the borders of paths such as minor street.
This seems bound up with its off-center location, the 7th Street shopping, the Broadway shopping, Transportation and also with the subjects' tendency to confound various streets, Row on 6th Street, the Spring Street financial district, and Skid as noted below. The Civic Center is strongest, because of its obvious for all. As the original main street and still the largest shopping Figure 18, page 38 Figure Bunker Hill is not as strong an image, on its sidewalks, by the length and continuity of its shopping, by despite its historical connotations, and quite a few felt that it the marquees of its movie houses, and by the street cars where was "not in the downtown area.
Although conceded to be the core, in bending 'around this major topographic feature, has suc- core, if anything is, yet Broadway was not a shopping area for ceeded in visually burying it. Its walks are crowded with Pershing Square is consistently the strongest element of all: an the ethnic minorities and lower-income groups whose living exotically landscaped open space in the heart of downtown, rein- quarters ring the central section.
They were quick to side-to-side differences in use or pedestrian intensity, such as describe the status differences between the Broadway crowds, and along Broadway, seem frequent enough to provide directional those to be seen on 7th Street, which, if not elite, is at least a differentiation. In fact all streets are visually closed, despite the middle-class shopping street.
Across the Hollywood Freeway is one of the strongest elements This confusion of paths was apparent in the interviews. To a of all, the nodal center of the Pla2avera Street. This was very Figure 19 lesser extent, the named longitudinal streets were also inter- sharply described: its shape, trees, benches, people; the tiles, the changeable. Several of these "north-south" streets, particularly "cobbled" actually brick-paved street, the tight space, the goods Flower, Hope, Grand, and Olive, all of which run into Bunker for sale, unfailingly the smells of candles and candy.
Not only Hill, tended at times, like the numbered streets, to be confused is this small spot visually very distinct, but it is the only true his- one for another. They felt that the grid had deserted them, and FIG. Broadway FIG. Alameda Street leads treacherously away to the left, you got there you discovered there was nothing there, after all. The large-scale But there was some evidence that orientation at the regional clearance of the civic area seems to have erased the original scale was not too difficult.
The apparatus of regional orienta- Figure 20 grid and substituted little new. The freeway is a sunken barrier. An endless spread, Below this grand scale, however, structure and identity seemed which may carry pleasant connotations of space around the dwell- to be quite difficult. There were no medium-si2ed districts, and ings, or overtones of weariness and disorientation, was the com- paths were confused.
People spoke of being lost when off habit- mon image. Said one subject: ual routes, of depending heavily on street signs. Ac the smallest scale, there were occasional pockers of high identity and mean- FIG. The Hollywood Freeway ing: mountain cabins, beach houses, or areas planted with highly differentiated vegetation.
But this was not universal, and an essential middle link in the structure, the imageability of districts at the medium scale, tended to be weak.
In almost all the interviews, where subjects were describing the trip they took from home to work, there was a progressive decrease in the vividness of impressions as they approached down- town. Near the home there was much detail about the slopes and turns, the vegetation and the people; there was evidence of daily interest and pleasure in the scene.
Nearing the center, this image gradually became grayer, more abstract and conceptual. The downtown area, as in Jersey City, was basically a collection of named uses and store fronts. Undoubtedly this was in part due to the increasing strain of driving on the major radials, but it seemed to persist even after leaving the car. Evidently the visual material is itself of poorer stuff. Perhaps the increasing smog also has its effect. Smog and haze, incidentally, were frequently mentioned as the torment of the city dweller.
They seemed to dull environmental colors, so that the over-all tone was reported to be whitish, yel- lowish, or gray. The early portion field Building, or City Hall. Even car drivers moving at high speed seemed to not themes in the interviews. This was the daily experience, the and enjoy such urban detail.
Bur these remarks did not apply to the area directly unde Figure 20, page 40 Trip details were full of references to signal lights and signs, study.
Central Los Angeles is far from the visual chaos of Jerse; intersections and turning problems. On the freeways, decisions City, and it has a rather liberal number of single building land had to be made far ahead of time; there were constant lane marks. Yet, except for a conceptual and rather undifferentiated maneuvers.
It was like shooting rapids in a boat, with the same grid, it was difficult to organize or comprehend as a whole. I excitement and tension, the same constant effort to "keep one's had no strong general symbols. The strongest images, Broadway head. There were frequent references to the over- at least, rather alien or even menacing.
Not one described then passes, the fun of the big interchanges, the kinesthetic sensations as pleasant or beautiful. The little, neglected Plaza, and certain of dropping, turning, climbing. For some persons, driving was a of the shopping or entertainment functions symbolized by the challenging, high-speed game.
One subject put this by topography. One subject felt that coming over a great hill each saying that the old Plaza, on one end, and the new Wilshire Bou- morning marked the midpoint of her journey and gave shape to levard, on the other, were the only things with character, and that it.
Another noted the extension of the city's scale due to the they summed up Los Angeles. The image seemed to lack much new roads, which have changed her whole conception of the of the recognizable character, stability, and pleasant meaning of relations of elements. There were references to the pleasure of central Boston.
On the other hand, as in Boston, these drivers We find, in comparing these three cities if we can find any- seemed to have difficulty in locating the freeway, in tying it to thing in such small samplings that, as might be expected, peo- the rest of the city structure.
There was a common experience ple adjust to their surroundings and extract structure and identity of a momentary loss of orientation when coming off a freeway our of the material at hand. The types of elements used in the ramp. Perhaps quite comparable between the three, although the proportion of because so much of the environment is new or changing, there element types may vary with the actual form.
Yet at the same was evidence of widespread, almost pathological, attachment to time, there are marked differences between the levels of orienta- anything that had survived the upheaval. Thus the tiny Plaza- tion and satisfaction in these different physical environments. Olvera Street node: or even the decayed hotels of Bunker Hill, Among other things, the tests made clear the significance of Figure 4.
Page 20 claimed the attention of many subjects. There was an impression space and breadth of view. The dominance of Boston's Charles from these few interviews that there is an even greater senti- River edge is based on the wide visual sweep it affords on enter- mental attachment to what is old than exists in conservative ing the city from this side. A large number of city elements Boston. There was an emotional delight arising from a broad view, Quite as apparent is the constant reference to socio-economic which was referred to many times.
Would it be possible, in our class: the avoidance of "lower class" Broadway in Los Angeles, cities, to make this panoramic experience a more common one, the recognition of the "upper class" Bergen Section in Jersey for the thousands who pass every day?
A broad view will some- City, or the unmistakable division of Boston's Beacon Hill into times expose chaos, or express characterless loneliness, but a well- two distinct sides. The interviews brought out another general response: to the Even raw or shapeless space seems to be remarkable, although way in which the physical scene symbolizes the passage of time. Many people refer to the clearance and The Boston interviews were full of references to age contrast: excavation at Dewey Square in Boston as a striking sight.
But when the space has some form, as it does along the Street; the old dark, ornamented, low Trinity Church silhou- Charles River or on Commonwealth Avenue, in Pershing Square etted against the new bright, stark, tall John Hancock Build- or Louisburg Square or to some extent in Copley Square, the ing, and so on. Indeed, descriptions were often made as if they impact is much stronger: the feature becomes memorable.
If were a response to contrast in the urban scene: sparial contrast. Boston's Scollay Square or Jersey City's Journal Square had spa- status contrast, use contrast, relative age, or comparisons of clean- rial character commensurate with their functional importance, liness or of landscaping. Elements and attributes became remark- they would truly be key features in their cities. The landscape features of the city: the vegetation or the water, In Los Angeles there is an impression that the fluidity of the were often noted with care and with pleasure.
The Jersey City environment and the absence of physical elements which anchor subjects were sharply aware of the few green oases in their sur- to the past are exciting and disturbing. Many descriptions of roundings; those of Los Angeles often stopped to describe the the scene by established residents, young or old, were accom- exotic variety of local vegetation.
Several of them reported daily panied by the ghosts of what used to be there. Changes, such as detours which lengthened their trip to work but allowed them to those wrought by the freeway system, have left scars on the men- pass by some particular planting, park, or body of water.
Here is tal image. It's very nice, and — oh — the jacarandas orient fast enough to keep up with them. One house about a block above has them.
On down Canyon and all kinds of palm trees there: the high General comments such as these quickly become apparent on palms and the low palms; and then on down to the park. It is possible, however, to study both interviews and field studies more systematically, and to learn Los Angeles, geared to the motor car, also furnishes the most much more about the character and structure of the urban image.
These elements may be defined as follows: 1. Paths are the channels along which the observer customarily, occasionally, or potentially moves. They may be streets, walkways, transit lines, canals, railroads. For many peo- ple, these are the predominant elements in their image. People observe the city while moving through it, and along these paths III. Edges are the linear elements not used or consid- ered as paths by the observer.
They are the boundaries between two phases, linear breaks in continuity: shores, railroad cuts, edges of development, walls. They are lateral references rather than coordinate axes. These edge elements, although probably not as dom- inant as paths, are for many people important organizing fea- There seems to be a public image of any given city tures, particularly in the role of holding together generalized which is the overlap of many individual images.
Or perhaps areas, as in the outline of a city by water or wall. Districts are the medium-to-Iarge sections of the number of citizens. Such group images are necessary if an indi- city, conceived of as having two-dimensional extent, which the vidual is to operate successfully within his environment and to observer mentally enters "inside of," and which are recognizable cooperate with his fellows.
Each individual picture is unique. Always identi- with some content that is rarely or never communicated, yet it fiable from the inside, they are also used for exterior reference if approximates the public image, which, in different environments, visible from the outside. Most people structure their city to some is more or less compelling, more or less embracing.
It seems to depend not objects. There are other influences on imageability, such as the only upon the individual but also upon the given city. Nodes, Nodes are points, the strategic spots in a city into name. These will be glossed over, since the objective here is to which an observer can enter, and which are the intensive foci to uncover the role of form itself.
It is taken for granted, that in and from which he is traveling. They may be primarily junc- actual design form should be used to reinforce meaning, and not tions, places of a break in transportation, a crossing or conver- to negate it. The contents of the city images so far studied, which are refer- Or the nodes may be simply concentrations, which gain their im- able to physical forms, can conveniently be classified into five portance from being the condensation of some use or physical types of elements: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks.
Ele- district, over which their influence radiates and of which they merus regularly overlap and pierce one another. If this analysis stand as a symbol. They may be called cores. Many nodes, of begins with the differentiation of the data into categories, it must course, partake of the nature of both junctions and concentra- end with their reintegration into the whole image. Our studies tions. The concept of node is related to the concept of path, have furnished much information about the visual character of since junctions are typically the convergence of paths, events on the element types.
This will be discussed below. Only to a the journey. It is similarly related to the concept of district, lesser extent, unfortunately, did the work make revelations about since cores are typically the intensive foci of districts, their polar- the interrelations between elements, or about image levels, image izing center.
In any event, some nodal points are to be found in qualities, or the development of the image. These latter topics almost every image, and in certain cases they may be the dom- will be treated at the end of this chapter. Landmarks are another type of point-reference, Paths but in this case the observer does not enter within them, they For most people interviewed, paths were the predominant city are external. They are usually a rather simply defined physical elements, although their importance varied according to the object: building, sign, store, or mountain.
Their use involves degree of familiarity with the city. People with least knowledge the singling our of one element from a host of possibilities. Subjects who knew the city better had usually radial references.
They may be within the city or at such a dis- mastered part of the path structure; these people thought mote in tance that for all practical purposes they symbolize a constant terms of specific paths and their interrelationships.
A tendency direction. Such are isolated towers, golden domes, great hills. Other landmarks are pri- The potential drama and identification in the highway system marily local, being visible only in restricted localities and from should nor be underestimated.
One Jersey City subject, who can certain approaches. These are the innumerable signs, store find little worth describing in her surroundings, suddenly lit up fronts, trees, doorknobs, and other urban derail, which fill in the when she described the Holland Tunnel. Another recounted her image of most observers. They are frequently used clues of iden- pleasure: tity and even of structure, and seem to be increasingly relied upon as a journey becomes more and more familiar.
You cross Baldwin Avenue, you see all of New York in front of you, you see the terrific drop of land the Palisades. Thus an and you're going down hill, and there you know: there's the expressway may be a path for the driver, and edge for the pedes- tunnel, there's the Hudson River and everything. I always trian. Or a central area may be a district when a city is organized look to the right to see if I can see the.
Statue of Liberty. But the categories seem to have stability for a the weather is. I have a real feeling of happiness because given observer when he is operating at a given level. Please try again later. Add to Wish List failed. Remove from wishlist failed. Adding to library failed. Please try again. Follow podcast failed. Unfollow podcast failed. Stream or download thousands of included titles.
Hidden Empire By: Kevin J. Narrated by: George Guidall. No default payment method selected. Add payment method. Switch payment method.
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