Dominion

I've been playing a lot of Skyrim lately, and ruminating on Elder Scrolls lore, so if you pardon this nerding-out, I'd like to offer my opinions on what will happen in the next game.

1. It will be called Dominion, and be based in the heartland of the Aldmeri Dominion (Summerset Isle).

2. No matter how you play Skyrim, things turn out for the Dominion's benefit. Canonized lore will have it that the Dragonborn completed the Assassin's Guild questline (ends with the assassination of Emperor Titus Mede II), whose end results in the fragmentation and collapse of the Tamrielic Empire. The whole civil war questline ends up in the dustbin of history; in a certain sense, it does not matter whether or not the Empire or Ulfric wins, as the whole of Tamriel splits into a bevy of statelets which the Dominion then vacuums up.

3. Thalmor religious persecution has developed into full-blown genocide. And Mundus is worse off for it; in fact, it's buckling.

4. It will be the Hero's job to assume Talos' divinity and stabilize Nirn and the firmament. The second-most-important task is destabilization of the Dominion, by now roundly considered evil. 

Of course, this doesn't undermine the ability to make moral choices--an Elder Scrolls staple--any more than the Empire's overarching existence's does Daggerfall. It's likely that Dominion's principal moral hazard lies in how the Hero goes about unifying the resistance, and be informed by various groups having different degrees of moral rectitude and likelihood of carrying out their resistance.

5. Freedom of movement--to a significant degree--will be curtailed, especially in the early game. (Full freedom of movement occurs in the late game.) No matter how you go about it, the Hero will quickly be branded an enemy of the Thalmor state, and so will need to get quite good at avoiding Justiciars, at least until you're powerful enough to take them head-on. Much of the early game will thus take on elements of getting from Place A to Place B without attracting authorities' interest, and creating and inculcating friendly bases throughout Summerset. The Dragonborn you ain't.

Coll. Incidentally, the Shouts mechanic will be implemented here, but in a vastly different way. It's likely that, in the lore, under the Last Dragonborn's influence, Shouting was developed from a "special skill" to a school of magic built on the Greybeards' teachings.

Coll 2. It's likely that Summerset's traditional joinable factions will be closed to non-Altmer (particularly if they keep this Nazi thing going). I'd bet that the "real" joinable factions will involve some combination of hidden factions and under-the-table dealings with traditional ones closely associated with the Thalmor, and relative freedom for the ones that aren't. So, for example, the Assassins' and Thieves' Guilds will be significantly easier to join than the Fighters' Guild or local Mages' Guild variant (unless that turns out to be the Psijic Order, which has zero known relations with the Thalmor overlords).

I don't really know what's on Bethesda's storyboards, but these ideas seem like they'd make the best possible Elder Scrolls game to me. Certainly, gameplay mechanics in Dominion will have a very different, unique, and interesting twist to them, particularly since what we know of the Thalmor implies that the next game will have to encourage stealth-based gameplay to a far greater extent than previous installments ever did.

For Geography Nerds

How many of us geography nerds have gotten annoyed that Google Streetview doesn't cover China? Whelp, here's the fix:

http://map.qq.com/

While everything's in Chinese, be advised that the commands on the upper left-hand corner of the map correspond to Map, Terrain, and Satellite views respectively. To the right of Satellite view is an icon with a peg--that's Streetview. You can't just drag and drop, though; click on the icon once to show the places where streetview is available, and click on the line or intersection of your choice to see what it looks like on the ground.

You can also search, although you get much better results if you first translate your criteria (name) to Chinese, and then search.

It's a fun way to see how incredibly diverse China's urban geography is.

Treasure Hunt

One of the blogs I follow is "Stroad to Boulevard", run by a Vancouverite. It documents how the difference between what Strong Towns' Charles Marohn calls stroads (and Pedestrian Observations' Alon Levy wide boulevards) and traditional European boulevards is merely one of priorities. Looking through recent posts, I noticed something interesting about where he chose to plant his link to Marseille's Bvld. Michelet here.

Can you find it?

If you can, and you comment, you, good sir, win One Free Internets! Huzzah!

Former Chamounix Drive crossing of the run at the bottom of Chamounix Valley.

Tucked away deep inside Fairmount Park, on the west bank of the Schuylkill River is Chamounix Mansion. near its highest point, Prospect Mount, is Chamounix Mansion. Reachable only by the two-mile-long arrow-straight Chamounix Drive from Belmont Avenue, it is far from the Plateau or the three great dells that once formed the centerpiece of the West Park–Belmont and Lansdowne and Sweetbriar. Nowadays the mansion is a youth hostel and there’s a riding academy nearby. But its location, on a spur far from the park’s main centers, renders it remote for those who do not have anything to do there. It is all but forgotten to the average park goer. But, truth be told, this  fourth dell was once one of the park’s major attractions–and even today, it holds in equal doses wonder and mystery and sweet calm.

While land deeds on this site go all the way back to Pennsylvania’s founding ... Read more at Hidden City Philadelphia.

PLVI Drift

PLVI stands for Peak Land Value Intersection--that is, where, in the city, the rents are costliest. It is, for all intents and purposes, the "center" of the city.

And, like the magnetic North Pole, it drifts. It can drift obliquely slightly, but this drift tends to favor the direction of the favored quarter. If the favored quarter is the west, it drifts in a westerly direction; if it's southeast, southeasterly. Sometimes accidents of geography can really nail it down, but it seems to head a couple of blocks further every generation or two.

Because High--later Market--Street was cluttered with market sheds for most of Philadelphia's early history, the PLVI, "directed" as it is by the elite in their favoritism patterns, favored Chestnut. At the time of the Revolution, the best evidence suggests it was at 2nd and Chestnut. Philadelphia's early financial district grew up along the 400 block of Chestnut, placing the PLVI there. By the fin-de-siècle, the largest department stores clustered around 8th and Market (Strawbridge & Clothier, Gimbel Brothers, and Lit Brothers), making that the PLVI, and by the 1920s it had jumped west to the corner of Broad and South Penn Square (City Hall), and thence migrated south to Broad and Chestnut, which is where Jane Jacobs found it (in her critique of it being the home of banks and not much else). It moved to 15th and Market not long after her writing, and then to 17th and JFK by the 1980s, when the postmodern skyscrapers were built--most recently the Comcast Center.

Bacon predicted it would move to 30th Street Station, which it is doing (slowly). The PLVI sat around City Hall for the first half of the 20th century in part because it was the point of maximal transportation access: the Reading Terminal and the Pennsylvania's Broad Street Station, to varying degrees of literalness, abutted the building. When Suburban replaced Broad as the Pennsy's main commuter station, and 30th Street its main intercity station, this all but guaranteed a long term westward movement of the PLVI. Something similar happened in New York, where Midtown Manhattan developed between Grand Central and Penn Station.

So what kinds of examples can you find in your city of PLVI drift? Former PLVIs are etched into the architecture. Where was the financial district located when your city was founded? A hundred years later? Two? Philadelphia, being one of the oldest major cities in the U.S., has more history to draw on than most--but that does not necessarily mean its PLVI drifted the furtherest.

In the Pipeline

Just because I haven't been posting doesn't mean I haven't been working on stuff! Here are some projects I'm hoping to publish in the near future...

1. Continuing "Neighborhood Mystique"...actually, what I want is for somebody like Plan Philly or Naked Philly to pick it up and pay me to write it. Next stop's Belmont Village.
2. Analyzing SEPTA's route changes. This should be up early next week.
3. John had some good comments on the MARC proposal. In light of these ideas, and other connections that need to be made, I'd like to work on the structure of the system some more.
4. I walked up to the Cynwyd* Trail last week and boy was I amazed. A linear park 30 feet wide and they're managing to fill all of it with trail! How is that even possible...? Criticism of excessive infrastructure, obviously, in the works.
5.Criticism of BRT. My general critique is that it's much too amorphous, it tends to be competitive with other modes more often than complimentary, and that it's often politicized by anti-rail factions who cite (illusory) cost reductions. This is spurred in large part due to Human Transit's recent BRT-love, and is not to say there isn't a place for it so much as to say it hasn't really found its place.
6. Talking about challenges and opportunities of the West Chester and Octoraro branches (the latter goes to Chadds Ford and eventually the Herr's plant down in Nottingham).
7. Talking about integrating the Reading and Quakertown proposals into a unified network. The current disunified way these proposals are being worked on undermines the considerable strength, via economies of scale, that unifying them together would offer.
8. A Center City frequent grid network. Developing a schematic has been troublesome for me. Well, coming (as I do) from an Illustrator background, Inkscape has been troublesome for me.
9. Improving service frequencies on crosstown buses that connect with the Broad Street Line.
10. Building a commuter bus network. One of my ideas is to turn some disused space near 30th Street Station into a commuter bus terminal for SEPTA and NJT. This would help cut down on the excessive number of bus routes along Market and consolidate service in such a way to make it easier to build on more.
11. The Lower East Falls, Wynnefield Heights, and Parkway plans are still in development. Actually, I haven't really worked on them (lazy...). I would really like to finish at least one soon.
12. Last, but not least, I want to ask the question, why is ridership so low at Bala station?
_____________
* KIN-wood.

Locust Street Connection

This is an outrage.

So a legally-mandated bridge crossing that has been in the works for three years and was designed with a lot of community involvement (I should know, I voted on the design myself) is being held up by a bunch of idiots who remained willfully ignorant. They are complaining that it will (a) destroy "mature shade trees" and (b) destroy their belovèd dog park.

I don't call trees planted in 1980 "mature shade trees". And, while the current dog park will be out of action for a little over a year, a decent alternative will be provided. Look at the site plan! And furthermore, after construction, the dog park will reopen bigger and better than ever. It's a win-win for everybody.

So shame on you, Fitler Square dog owners who couldn't be bothered to inform themselves for 156.5 weeks that their park would be temporarily modified for a legally-mandated bridge project. And especially shame on you, Damon Roberts, City Council also-ran, for demonstrating that you are incompetent for the job: it is a Councilman's job to know what public projects are happening in their district, and the fact you are filing suit demonstrates that you did not. You have lost my vote now and forevermore.

I can only hope that whichever judge this asinine case goes in front of laughs it out of court. This is a suit they cannot win. This will only cause a delay--and a delay means a wastage of public funds. Thank you for wasting our tax money, Damon Roberts. You truly do not deserve an elected position of any kind.

Tell the Friends of the Schuylkill River Park to call Damon Roberts out here.

In the Pipeline

I've had some ideas for blog posts for a while, but haven't been executing for the past couple of days. However, hopefully (maybe) look for these in the coming days:

(1) A post on the hierarchy of parks, from the neighborhood square to the main city greenspace;
(2) A post on Roman-style house construction viz. setback construction;
(3) Finishing my series on the Loop Network (Philadelphia2050);
(4) Concerns with the new zoning code and the comprehensive Philadelphia2035 city plan;
(5) Taking a look at transportation centers in Philadelphia and how they can be improved; and
(6) Whatever else is on my mind.

What will happen? We shall see!

Map Porn!

Check this out! This map shows what's in a x-minute transit (walking?) radius of anywhere you plunk the point down. I've set it to 15-minute radiuses of City Hall, top, and Wissahickon Transfer, bottom.

Warning: messing with the time slide makes changing zooming nigh-impossible and may cause tab to crash.

CCD on YouTube

Direct Link

Philly's top Building Improvement District (BID) is now 20 years old!

The CCD has been instrumental in making Center City relevant again. Now if City Council would get their heads out of their asses and lower the wage tax, reduce business taxes, and enact a land value tax, Philadelphia would seem a whole lot more attractive. Paul Levy has been phenomenal as a booster for our city.

Dropsie College

 Here is an interesting find.

There's a small collection of old buildings on North Broad, just north of Temple University, at York Street. When I first saw them I assumed it was a bank on the corner, and the building recessed from the street was some Gilded Age nouveau riche's manse.

Ah! It turns out not. This small complex was actually, at the turn of the century, the location of Congregation Mikveh Israel, and the building set back from the street--the one that looks like a manse--a college founded by the synagogue's Gilded Age leaders. This college, Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Studies, was actually, at one time, one of the premier centers for Jewish and antiquities studies in the United States. People such as Noam Chomsky's father taught there. Founded in 1907, it was, throughout its 79-year history, closely interlinked with Penn, and during the 1980s, after an arson attack, moved out of this handsome North Broad edifice to Lower Merion, and eventually merged with Penn, becoming the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (CAJS). The Dropsie library is now a key part of Penn's Semitic studies library.

Below is an image of what it looks like today, from Google Street Maps, and here is also what Penn's librarians have to say about it (warning: PDF). Note that according to the 1942 WPA maps on PhilaGeoHistory, Dropsie College's address was 2321 North Broad, and the synagogue, 2359. A small institution, Gratz College, which may or may not have been attached to Dropsie, but was certainly attached to the synagogue, is also marked at 1340 W. York.

Postgreen's Mojo

First Steel, 1703 and 1705 Howard

Can Postgreen do it again?

Postgreen Home's 100k House at the corner of Susquehanna and Amber in Kensington is fueling a mini-boom around it. It recently sold for $300k and Postgreen and other builders, mainly LEED, but not all, have been infilling that stretch like crazy. Postgreen developments within three or four blocks or so of 100k include: Passive House, Skinny, and 2.5 Beta, with Passive being furtherest away.

Will Postgreen spark another renaissance? They have just unveiled two projects along the 1700 block of Howard in Old Kensington, about a mile from the Susquehanna and Amber nexus of their previous efforts. These two projects are the K'House and First Steel. K'House is designed by DIGSAU, and First Steel by Postgreen's stalwart architectural firm, Interface, the folks behind most (if not all) Postgreen designs to date, as well as other impressive infill designs, like Fishtown's Nine.

The corner of Howard and Cecil B. Moore today looks like the corner of Susquehanna and Amber two years ago, when 100k first went up. There is no question Postgreen's innovative and pioneering presence at that corner is what sparked the mad development there today--but the question still has to be asked: can they do it again? Or was that corner somehow unique? Can K'House--and K'House is really the big one--be the destination "spark" 100k was? Postgreen certainly thinks so, and I hope so. This is an area of the city ripe for reinvestment, and reinvestment has been percolating north of Girard and west of Frankford for some time now, but only recently has it been this far from either.

K'House, 1713 Howard, 1712-14 Hope

Crossing the Lines

Do any of you remember the line from Ghostbusters "Never cross the beams"? Chekhov's Gun--at the end of the movie they had to. This blog is dedicated to doing just that--crossing the beams and looking for new ways of thinking about things. And since it's about transportation, and transportation is all about lines, it's "Crossing the Lines".


A large part of what drives this, too, is the pressing need for a high-quality Philadelphia-centric transportation blog, like Cap'n Transit and the Second Avenue Sagas in New York, or Greater Greater Washington down in D.C. We need to talk about issues like the underperfomance of our subway system, and the overengineering of Amtrak's current Northeast HSR proposal viz. Philadelphia County, a blog gives voice, and with a voice minds can be changed or made.