Recently published pieces include:

Chicago Insider: Max Grinnell in Rented Spaces

Magnificent Seven: Classic American Road Trips in the Guardian

Profile of River North for the Not For Tourist’s Guide to Chicago

Profile of East Boston for the Not For Tourist’s Guide to Boston

Profiles of the Hyde Park and Kenwood communities in the South Side of Chicago. (or, in some quarters, the past and present homes of President-elect Barack Obama)

Critique of Richard Florida’s “Creative Class” Theory of Urban Development (Max’s critique starts on the second page of this document)

Books

“Hyde Park, Illinois” Published by Arcadia Publications

“24 Great Walks in Chicago” Published by Frommer’s.

“The Rough Guide to Chicago” Published by the Penguin Group.

“The Rough Guide to the United States” Published by the Penguin Group.

Other Works and Commentaries

Harvard, Heinekens, and Steven John Bernstein

Drinking on the steps of a rarefied college building is a tradition that goes back centuries, and I’m fairly sure that such behavior led to the St. Scholastica Riot of 1355. Seven centuries had passed since those events, the town-gown relationship between the two Oxfords had largely improved, and I was sitting on the steps on Harvard’s University Hall sharing a Heineken with Steven John Bernstein, veteran, free spirit, and a fellow who enjoyed the easy give and take of a late summer conversation as much I did.

Harvard Yard is a disparate jumble of architectural forms, tho’ certain seasonal consistencies can be found in the figures of precious Harvard College freshmen, people of real and imagined importance in these precincts, and the often unsung throngs of Asian tourists. Everyone has seen the overblown portrayal of the neophyte collegian and the tweedy stereotype of the professor, but who’s paying attention to the tourists who flock to the Yard? Simply put: I am. And so was Steven John Bernstein.

Gaggles of tourists are usually in front of University Hall come rain, come shine, come cause-of-the-week rally, come impromptu a cappella session, and so on. The University offers informal tours, formal tours, and a private company offers “The Ultimate Harvard Experience” through their tours which promise both “in-depth knowledge” and “side-splitting jokes”. One can imagine that since all of the guides are Harvard students, hopefully the twain do meet in jokes that involve epiphanies regarding the structure of benzene rings or the travel narratives of V.S. Naipul.

I hadn’t come seeking Steven John Bernstein, but apparently he was seeking me. Or at the very least, someone to share a Heineken with. No one had ever attempted conversation with me while walking in Harvard Yard, so it was a bit out of character to hear a “Hey. Hey, you!” coming from the top step of University Hall.

Was I the “you” in question? I had to be, and Bernstein repeats himself and adds “Want a beer?”. A clutch of older Japanese tourists with Gilligan hats on looked at me as if to see if I would climb those stairs to this vaguely disheveled man and his brown bag of booze. I did, and they turned back to investigate John Harvard’s big toe, which is the primary attraction in this part of the Yard.

“Here, take this”. Bernstein handed me a bottle and took a shiny new bottle opener from his duffel bag. It looked like the standard military issue duffel bag, and the bottle opener said “Navy Reserves” along its well-worn side. “I asked the security guard over at the gate if I could drink a few beers over here”. Bernstein pointed over to a Harvard-variety rent-a-cop. A badge, a utility belt, and a substantial night stick were the hallmarks of this particularly weighty guardian of the Yard. The guard looked at us with some measure of incredulity and kept on walking.

“I just got down here off the Peter Pan bus from Vermont. Picked up my check from the disability office, and here I am”. Bernstein had polished off one Heineken and was working on his second as he made a rather graceful motion that allowed him to swing his bottle up to his mouth while also manipulating the bottle opener to open my beer. I was thoroughly impressed.

I offered my hand, a bit of introduction, and he said “I’m Steven John Bernstein. A sort of a recovering Jew.” He paused and said, “And I’m from Vermont“. As someone who is fairly obsessed with geography, I felt a place-based warmth when he offered up his place of origin so quickly and freely. “I’ve been out of the military for ten years, and I just keep on wandering as much as I can.” Sounds good to me, I said. “After I came back from Vermont-Wait a minute, did I tell you about what happened to me in Vermont?”. No, no, not yet, I said.

“I was coming back from Vermont on the bus right? Woman gets on in Bellows Falls and she sits next to me and she’s my type of woman, I can tell that right off. Her hair is long, she’s got a skirt on, and she has a guitar.” Bernstein pauses and thinks about the description. “Well, she had a guitar case. And that’s it! Just the guitar case. Man, that’s traveling light”. I agreed. “After thirty minutes, we’re making out, right there on the bus! On the fucking bus!”. In a matter of a few choice seconds and a few choice phrases, Bernstein has been transformed from Johnny Appleseed to a Messianic-harbinger of bus-based lasciviousness. The Japanese tourists move to the other side of the John Harvard statue in an attempt to shield the younger members of their group.

“I mean thirty minutes. Whoa.” His voice has dropped to a whisper, and I don’t know if he’s back to the calm after the storm, or the calm before a larger storm, or just pausing to build up a good head of steam before continuing on. “So we get to Springfield, and she asks ‘Do you want to come over to my place and I’ll make dinner?’ Shit. Of course, I do, right? Right?” We’re back to the storm, conversationally speaking, and it seems like Bernstein is building into a Class Five narrative tempo, and maybe we’ll reach Class Ten before the conversation ends.

“At her house, she starts making some food and offers me some wine. Food, wine, a beautiful woman with a guitar case? Wow, man, wow! And then she lays it on me. Right then, she lays it on me.” Bernstein punctuates the “on me” with two forefinger jabs into the air and continues, “My husband is coming home soon. Let’s eat and get into bed”. “Shit. Shit. Shit”. Bernstein comes down into a sotto voce and says to me “You know what I did, Max?”. I don’t know, what? I said. ” ‘Forget the food, let’s get into bed. Ha!”.

By this point, Steven John Bernstein was the best thing that had ever happened to me in Harvard Yard, and it reminded me why I like to wander around even the most familiar places. It’s hard to tell when a chance encounter in a cerebral campus setting may lead into a tale of 21^st century “free love” told by a Heineken-drinking wanderer, so always keep your eyes and ears open.

One thing still trouble me: What did Bernstein mean when he said he was “a recovering Jew”?

Twisting The Day Away at Boston’s City Hall

Chubby Checker and Boston’s modernist-styled City Hall building probably don’t come up often in the same sentence, or at least not in polite company. On a sweaty July day whose sky seemed to have the consistency of grey mustard I became acquainted with both of these American icons, though truth be told, The Twist Master and I haven’t crossed paths since. I can’t say under than my own transformative experience that there’s a casual relationship between the two, much less a casual one.

Boston was my last stop after a whirlwind tour of the University of Virginia’s Summer Enrichment Program for gifted high school students and Washington, D.C. where I encountered angry mid-summer thunderstorms and a very muddy Mall. Now I was standing in front of this hulking concrete-brick chunk of a building that had once been uncharitably referred to as “the box that Faneuil Hall came in”. In a largely pre-Internet world, I had arrived in Boston via the reliable Amtrak (my family didn’t travel via air…long story) with my 45-day rail pass, dirty laundry, and a 1990 “Let’s Go” guide to Boston. After collecting the free independent weekly in those parts and a copy of the Boston Herald (and its headline which gently proclaimed “MAYOR ANGERS COPS”), I made my way to Boston’s City Hall with a rendezvous with Chubby and a piece of the recent architectural past.

Leaving the bunker that was (and is) the public face of the T’s Government Station, I was besieged by bricks in every direction laid in a plaza that led to a mass of exposed concrete which resembled the upside-down plastic milk crate that is Boston’s City Hall. It didn’t really capture my attention as much as Chubby did. Upon leaving one sweaty environment (the T station) for another one (the moisture-laden air of a Boston summer), I noticed that Chubby had just entered into what seemed like an alternate version of “The Twist”, but I soon came to realize that it was actually “Let’s Twist Again”. The radio-dial twirling public of the 1960s seemed to have an unquenchable thirst for twist-themed numbers, and he spent the next 20 minutes or so going over these strangely familiar musical permutations. As a musician myself at the time, I couldn’t imagine getting more than one variation out of this very exhaustible theme. But then again, Rachmaninoff got 24 out of Paganini’s fiery bowing , so hey, why couldn’t Chubby?

Then I began to think that this whole expansive-space-swallowing-brick-plaza-medieval-modern-poured-concrete-castle thing called Boston City Hall wasn’t so bad. Hey, if people are dancing around and vendors are selling hot dogs with the right trimmings, this whole plaza thing is working pretty well, right? I knew that there was a touch of the budding urbanologist in me right then when I thought: Let me come back in a few days and pull a little “compare/contrast” action on this patch of urban space.

Post-Chubby, I decided to come back a few days later in the late afternoon on a Friday, just to see what slice of urban life I could examine in the City Hall environs. Alright, it wasn’t completely dead, but it had barely made it out of the trauma ward of urban vitality. A few people scattered here and there after work talking to friends, and one lone vendor perched right next to the brick-hood entrance to the T station. Chubby wasn’t there, and I don’t know if even he could have performed a beat of Twist-based triage at this point. I stayed for about an hour waiting to see some sign of real life. Maybe one of those Ben Franklin-look-a-likes would come over from Faneuil Hall, effectively kidnapping an unsuspecting group of tourists from Moline. They would be dragged 200 years into the future from ye olde times, landing on a world of modernist architecture. Ha, that will show them to take the last tour of the day. Didn’t happen, and I was left alone with a few homeless men and the vendor who packed up his things around 6:30.

Even now, over fifteen years later, I still don’t know what can be done with Boston’s City Hall and its accompanying plaza. The mayor has talked about moving city government out of the building and moving the whole municipal government crowd over to South Boston. So what’s next after that? Could be a long-term lease for some private sector types, could be demolition, or it could be just more status quo. It seems to be that even with the big festivals, a visiting circus, the annual Chowderfest, people just don’t seem to be drawn to the space. There’s really no where to sit (comfortably), no permanent or even semi-permanent vendors, and not even a trace of water (people like water features in parks, plazas, you name it). It’s time for a Marshall Plan for this space, and if that means taking it down to the scorched earth of the old raucous Scollay Square which used to dominate the area in pre-urban renewal times, it should be done.

In the meantime, I haven’t seen Chubby since the last millennium, so a kind request to Chubby: have your people call my people and let’s talk about the City Hall Plaza Twist.

My Urban Manifesto, Part One

In the 1990s, growth and development in and around American cities was truly smoking., economically speaking. Gut rehabs were all the rage, few cities started building new mass transit system, and crime rates reached new lows, effectively reversing decades of antisocial behavior patterns that included increased gunplay, theft, homicide, and other unpleasant goings-on.

Today, cities are in a crunch, and with all the talk of the ‘knowledge economy’ and the ‘creative class’, we still need to work on some basics. Without further ado, here’s my own personal urban wish list.

1. Get cracking on fixing urban infrastructure (pronto!)

I’m tired of hearing about bridges falling down, commuter rail trains derailing, and sidewalks that look like roadmaps of Indiana, what with all their cracks, jagged edges, and what have you. The economic costs that these problems inflict on cities’ economic well-being is staggering, and it certainly doesn’t encourage any future inward development on the part of new investors. It’s certainly true that cities are broke, and short of issuing more bonds, money not be forthcoming in the immediate future, but a creative solution may need to arise from the feds. (Works Progress Administration Part II, anyone?)

2. Find a way (by any means necessary) to make substantial changes to urban public school systems.

As someone who has seen incremental changes (and positive ones, at that) within the Chicago Public School system, I am willing to bet that change is possible anywhere. Children have been left behind everywhere for the past few years despite attempts to do just the opposite, and it’s time to rethink both the funding mechanisms for large urban public school districts and also the general philosophy behind the organization of the entire school day. Let’s stop renaming schools “academies” just to indicate some supposed progress and really start thinking about lasting and meaningful change. If we can bring back a substantial base of middle-class families to urban public school districts that might provide a base to build upon in terms of support for students and the general culture of each school. Which brings me to my next point….

3. Make provisions for affordable housing in cities through community land trusts.

Socioeconomic inequality continues to grow in the United States, and we need to try to figure out how to keep a mix of people in cities. Community land trusts can help out the situation of many middle class families, and places like Seattle have had great success with this type of program. Hey, why not check out the work of the Homestead Community Land Trust at this site: http://www.homesteadclt.org/. Making cities affordable for a wide range for people makes for more interesting cities in the long run, and don’t let me get all choked up about the American Dream, apple pie, baseball, and social capital.

More to follow, and yes, I have forgotten about jobs, urban amenities, quality of life, and the future of places like Flint!