Uncategorized – Page 20

My Love of Music and Black History Month

March 2.2023

When Beau Dixon came to town, I had to go and see him at the Meridian Theater in Ottawa. The ninety-minute show promised Beau’s music, blues, rock, and soul, my favorites. I must have gotten one of the last tickets on the balcony in the last row. But I did not complain; the back row has good acoustics and Beau’s music is loud.

It is Black History Month and Beau had a scripted, fast-moving show displaying black music at its best, playing songs from Bob Marley, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and others. I came to listen to and enjoy my favorite type of music and ended up learning about the contribution of black music to North American culture.

Beau showed his multi-talented musical genius by playing the harmonica, and keyboard and singing. It was a tour de force and brought back fond memories.

My first job after finishing graduate school at the University of North Carolina was in Norfolk, VA, and I just had to build a stereo system to listen to my music. I still remember the high-quality Harman-Kardon component system, that I built. Testing the system, I played my favorite pianist, Oscar Peterson, at full blast when there was a banging on the door of our rented apartment. Scared that management might throw us out for being too loud, I cautiously opened the door to discover a black pastor. I turned the volume down and asked him to come in. Before explaining that he was looking for donations for his church, he congratulated me on playing “excellent religious” music. I had Oscar Peterson playing his composition “Hymn to Freedom”, an ode he wrote for the freedom marchers in the 1960s. With such an introduction, I had no choice in my mind but to offer a large contribution to his church.

Listen to Oscar Peterson playing his composition in Denmark, in 1964.

The other memory took me back to when we went to listen to Oscar Peterson playing at Norfolk State College in 1973. Oscar gave a rousing concert with mostly spirituals, and the audience was rocking along with his playing. We may have been the only white folks in the audience that I found a bit eery but in those days there was still much segregation by skin color and this was a black college.

Beau drew a mixed audience in Ottawa. A large percentage of the people were black and their enthusiasm showed in the tapping, stomping, and singing along with many of the songs. It was an appreciative audience and I also could not help myself but start stomping with my feet. My neighbor was swaying from left to right, nudging me constantly. Some in the audience jumped onto the floor and danced while others stood up and clapped to the sound of well-known songs like “Hound Dog”, popularized by Elvis Presley in 1956, but originally recorded by “Big Mama” Thornton in 1952. As Beau explained, many famous songs originated from black people but were popularized by white folks.

Listen to the first recording of the song by Big Mama Thornton in 1952.

Throughout the meticulously curated show, Beau engaged the audience with his charm and infectious energy. And his singers not only performed well-known songs but also talked about black Canadians’ contributions to our society, such as Viola Desmond, a civil rights activist from Nova Scotia; Lincoln Alexander, the first black member of Parliament and Lieutenant Governor of Ontario; Drake, the rapper, Michaelle Jean, previous Governor General of Canada.

One highlight of the program was when Beau’s singers performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, which is the hymn of black people; a song I have not heard before. The audience responded by standing up and singing along with the band; it was a highly emotional experience.

Listen to the hymn performed by the Amanah AME Zion Church choir, from Knightdale, NC, in 2022.

Although I went to hear my favorite music and I was not disappointed, I learned much about the contribution black culture made to Canadian society.

My Musings at Ottawa’s Ski Hills

February 25, 2023

We sat outside on Adirondack chairs nursing a coffee in the sunshine. The temperature was around freezing. Next to us, young people drank beer, taking a break from snowboarding or downhill skiing. The flat valley at the bottom of the mountain buzzed with the young crowd, some people getting ready with rented skis while others picked up their skis leaning against the ski stands. It was a noisy atmosphere with laughter, and rock music blasting out of loudspeakers at the lodge.

I thought back to Covid times just a couple of years ago when we had to “distance ourselves” from each other and preferably avoid people altogether. This was the total opposite, with the crowd milling around with no masks nearby. What a pleasurable and positive change I thought!

John, a grizzled ski instructor, took our grandchildren for a ski lesson, their first time on skis; they live in Durham, NC with hardly an opportunity to ski. John introduced himself to the children and asked softly about their names, where they are from, and what other sports they play and enjoy. Then they went off to the “magic carpet” for their lesson (the magic carpet is a conveyor belt that takes beginner skiers up the hill while standing on it). We heard later the lesson started with skiing in a circle on one foot, pushing with the other foot. The upshot of the lesson was that the children came back and jumped on the ski lift accompanied by their father and aunt and came down on the steep hills with gusto, with maybe a fall of two.

The next day we tried to interest the grandchildren in other winter activities such as cross-country skiing and snowshoeing, which they found boring. And they lasted a short time tobogganing because they had to walk up the relatively short hill. So we changed plans and went back to downhill skiing the following day.

Emily, a high school senior, took the children for another downhill ski lesson the next day. The children bonded instantly with Emily when she explained she had two siblings the same age as they were. Emily took them up the ski lift and taught them to keep their skis parallel, and showed them how to turn. In two amazing lessons, the grandchildren, aged 13 and 9, were flying down the steep hills.

During the ski lesson, we took a walk along the hills and noticed the real estate development taking place around the slopes. There is a modern hotel and condos built that, we heard, were owner-occupied or rented, according to a woman walking a dog with whom we engaged in a conversation.

She had a strong accent, and I inquired where she was from. She proudly explained she came from Bosnia 17 years ago when she married her Canadian husband and started working in a café making sandwiches that she had never made before. That was surprising to me. I thought everybody knew how to make a sandwich, but she said she was a “professional woman” and perhaps she worked in an office back home. But she advanced her career and is a financial person at Carleton University today.

During the last seventeen years, she has become a true “Canadian”, she said. As an example of what she meant, she related that when she goes home, she tells people not to smoke in her presence. It took me a few minutes to digest this aspect of being a Canadian; I was not aware of it. To emphasize her point, she said that back in Bosnia, people tell her she is more Canadian now than Bosnian. She confided in us she has no intention of going back home. Considering that she has a Canadian husband with a good government job in Ottawa and a high school-age daughter here, it would make sense for her to carry on with her life here in Canada.

Although she had a place close by, she was not a skier. She was an immigrant and although some come from Europe, most immigrants to Canada are from China and India today, where skiing may not be popular and available to the extent it is available in Canada. I noticed perhaps a dozen Asians among the hundreds of skiers on the hills. This, of course, may change in the future as more immigrants become used to the local climate and culture.

We moved from Washington, DC to Ottawa in 1971 and had become keen skiers in no time; both downhill and cross-country. And our children took up all the winter sports. Having graduated from high school here, the children moved on and left the area. Their children have not had the opportunity to ski; except when they come to visit us. And this is how our grandchildren from Durham, NC came up and discovered downhill skiing this year. I am sure they are dreaming of coming back for more skiing.

The Death of the Single-Family Home on a Quarter-Acre Lot

February 3. 2023

The house on a quarter-acre lot, which has been the Canadian dream, is under vicious attack. The quarter-acre lot in planning terms is the R1 zone, which occupies over half of the land of Canadian cities. In Ottawa, the R1 zone occupies over 50% of the land; in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver, it is over 60%, while in Montreal it is 45%.

But the R1 zone is “exclusionary” cry social advocates, citing the shortage and unaffordability of housing, to absorb people arriving in Canada’s cities from the hinterland, and from abroad. R1 is the culprit and therefore, it must be eliminated to permit higher densities, putting two and three dwellings on the quarter-acre lot.

But how can the R1 zone be “exclusionary” when more than half of the land used in cities is zoned R1? To me, the word exclusionary conjures up images of elite golf clubs; high-end tennis clubs, and similar facilities with entrance requirements that a minority of people possess. And by a minority, we usually talk about the “top” five percent or even the top one percent of people.

In 2016, fifty-three percent of dwellings were single-family detached homes in the R1 zone in Canada, and I would not call this metric exclusionary. The rest of the Canadians live in apartments and condominiums.

I realize municipalities could use zoning for excluding certain groups of people by specifying minimum lot and house sizes, which could make purchasing a house unaffordable for some people. It happened to blacks in parts of the United States (until it became illegal to do so), but I have seen nothing in Canada to illustrate that zoning has been used to exclude a specific group of people from a community.

I studied city planning at the University of North Carolina where Professor Chapin wrote and taught the classic and long-used textbook “Urban Land Use Planning”. According to him, zoning has been a tool to regulate development, generated by employment growth, creating a need for housing, schools, and commercial development.

We have been fortunate in Canada to date, being able to expand the urban boundaries of our metropolitan areas, to provide for growth and reasonably priced housing. Now, suddenly, we find that environmental concerns, greenbelts, and natural boundaries like water and mountains constrict some of our cities concurrent with our radically exploding immigration intake, creating an unprecedented demand for housing.

The government solution to the housing crisis is to densify our communities, and one approach is to permit the doubling or tripling of dwellings that occupy half the land of our cities. And that is the R1 zone. Conclusion: it has to be done away with. Ontario recently introduced legislation to triple the population of the R1 zone by allowing three dwellings on the quarter-acre lot instead of one, starting in the summer of 2023.

I think that by doing so, we’ll destroy some of our attractive and historical districts. Allowing three dwellings where there is one now will lead to a haphazard and unsightly streetscape. Instead of the usual one car per dwelling, we’ll have four of five cars on the same piece of land and lacking parking space on the quarter-acre lot, on the streets. Traffic will increase on roads designed for low-density residential districts. Schools will have to be renovated to serve more children on limited sites.

So, you ask, what is the solution for the burgeoning demand for additional housing? I think that we’ll have to develop some new towns and/or attract our future development into peripheral small towns around our metropolitan areas.

Failing that approach, I suggest that densification in our single-family communities should be allowed gradually in places where the installed infrastructure permits additional development, or until after governments build the required infrastructure.

But the demise of the single-family dwelling on a quarter-acre lot has already started. In my community, doubles have replaced single-family units. In one situation, someone purchased two lots, demolished the homes on the land, and constructed three units. These small-scale redevelopments, to date, have bordered our community, but I foresee some enterprising homeowners in the middle of our community replacing their dwellings with a duplex or triplex, creating increased traffic and destroying the family-oriented nature of the community.

Experience with “Public Engagement” in the City of Ottawa

January 21, 2023

My local City Councilor invited me to a “public engagement” meeting on a rezoning application for a development proposal in my neighborhood. The meeting, held by zoom, was scheduled for 7:00-8:30 pm. The purpose of the meeting, we had been told, was to present and provide feedback on changes that had been made to the original proposal by the developer presented at our first meeting a few months earlier and gain public input. The original proposal was for two 25 and one 28-story towers sitting on a six-story podium at the intersection of two arterial roads. Single-family, mostly bungalows, surround the site on three sides.

But, right at the beginning of the meeting, the moderator reduced the meeting to an exchange of information, informing us that the only questions from the audience (whom he estimated to be around 80) would be by writing them in a Question and Answer Chat room for a response after all the presentations. In the meantime, the moderator limited us to listening only, a lesser event than discussing the merits of the proposal.

Then he insulted the audience by asking them to behave civilly and respectfully, conjuring up the image of the rough Liverpool waterfront pub in the 19^th century. Mr. Moderator, we are polite Canadians; we are courteous and mostly low-keyed. We do not need a lecture from you on how to behave. At any rate, the audience was muted for the entire evening – so what opportunity would there have even been to be loud and rowdy? I found these actions – the lecture and the muting – to be disrespectful to the audience, who are all ratepayers and have a right to be heard.

The session began with my Councilor, who gave his views on the development and on the City of Ottawa’s planning goal for densification to provide for future population growth. It continued with presentations by the planner, architect, engineer, Ottawa City Planner, and the developer. These presentations took up over an hour of the allotted meeting time, leaving precious little time for the hundred-plus comments that accumulated on the “chat line” and some in the Q&A column during the zoom call. So, with limited time available for the audience to engage in the discussion, and with the audience all muted, the moderator summarized what he believed to be related questions from the ‘chat line” and Q&A column, and referred them to the panelists for a response. The members of the audience had no opportunity to express their views in their own words and address the proponents directly.

Following the earlier “public engagement” session, the new proposal reflected some of the public’s comments from that earlier meeting; reduced the podium from six to four levels to blend better with the surroundings, but increased the height of the buildings to two 28-story and one 32-story building, adding over one hundred units, with the total project to accommodate 998 units. The new height proposed is over 5 times what is currently permitted in the zoning code.

With no proper opportunity to engage with the proponents, this process was not engaging the public by any stretch of the imagination. Listening for over an hour to an information dump and being required to submit questions in writing over zoom, not knowing if the question will be answered or allowing any opportunity for follows-clarifications is certainly not public engagement. People want to express their thoughts in their own words, address their comments to specific individuals and not have their comments lumped together with other comments and interpreted by a moderator.

I am both an architect and a city planner by training and so understood most of the “professional” presentations – but I wonder how many did without an opportunity to seek clarification?

As a city planner, I both participated in and conducted “public engagement” in both Canada and the United States, at various levels, including municipal. The essence of these meetings was to present the proposal in a few minutes to allow maximum time for audience questioning and participation. At least three-quarters of the time was devoted to public input. This meeting was the opposite: three-quarters of the time was spent on describing the proposal and the rest by the moderator interpreting the public comments.

I give credit to the Councilor and the city to organize this “public engagement” zoom meeting. It is desirable and useful to inform the neighborhood people and canvas the residents for their comments; they will have to live with the development. But I question the usefulness of this session: was there anything in that meeting that would help people come to an amicable resolution? To me, this exercise was more like checking the box for “public engagement”.

This was a weird zoom meeting in that only the panelists – the Councilors, consultants, developer, and the City of Ottawa official – were shown on the screen while people like me were back in our homes staring at our computer screens and listening. We did not see who else was listening. I always see all zoom participants in other such meetings I have joined. It was one-way communication; we never had a live word. The moderator combined and interpreted the questions that we put on the “chat” line. I found it very dissatisfying.

My impression is that the city will probably process this rezoning application with some minor tinkering with the height of the towers, landscaping, and other issues but will not materially change it, such as, for example, bringing it into conformance with the current zoning envelope. Having checked off the “public engagement” box, the city has not really shown an interest in finding out what the public thinks about how this proposal could be made into a quality project consistent with the character of the neighborhood and the larger surroundings. (For example, how about a medical office complex in proximity to the proposed huge hospital development just north on Fisher Avenue)? The developers appear to have their way in this city; they propose, and the city massages the proposal for approval. Just my opinion.

The Challenge of Tipping at the Taj Mahal and Other UNESCO World Heritage Sites

January 16, 2023

We caught an early Indian Railways train in Delhi to get to the Taj Mahal in Agra. There was a substantial breakfast served by a dapper, uniformed porter on the two-hour train ride. We joined a long line of people waiting for the opening when we arrived at the Taj at 7:00 am. Inside, several official guides competed for our attention.

One guide, a small man with a starched white shirt and tie and formal manner, offered to show me where to take the best photo shots, including where the shots in the James Bond movie Octopussy were taken. Believing he was a government employee on the Taj grounds, I thought his services were free.

He took me on an extensive tour that lasted more than half an hour. He knew the story of the Taj. And he showed me a glorious spot to take a picture of the Taj, from an arcade looking at the front of the Taj, framed by an arch above. It is a novel snapshot that shows the Taj with the minarets at the four corners. It was early in the morning, and the white marble building showed unforgettable translucency in the rising sun.

I thought that even though he was a government employee, I should at least offer him a tip for his tour and offered as much as the entrance fee. He asked me what it was for. I said I wanted to show my appreciation for his time with a tip.

He stared at me in astonishment, then laughed and explained that I did not realize what an expert story he shared with me and that at least ten times what I offered would be a minimum to pay for his expertise. His gall and arrogance astonished me. I was going to negotiate but got my back up at hearing what I thought was an outrageous demand. I told him he had never said that he expected remuneration and that if I had been aware that he would expect so much money, I would have refused his offer for the tour. And I started walking away.

He called after me and negotiated to double my original offer. I chalked up this encounter as an experience in traveling at world-famous tourist sites.

This incident reminded me of an episode we had in Jaresh, Egypt, where we paid for a guided tour. The guide was excellent, and I offered what I thought was a generous tip, which he pooh-poohed and told me to give it to the paperboy and explained in a loud voice that he was worth ten times as much. I finally just started walking away from him, leaving an amount equal to the entrance fee that the guide then threw to the boy selling trinkets at the gate.

From these two experiences, I gathered that, as an initial gambit, the guides ask ten times what you offer, but are happy to accept less than half the suggested tip. I found tipping an unpleasant task with educated and experienced guides.

Traveling in Morocco (Fez) and Egypt (Karnak), the distinguished-looking guides, those with a suit and a tie, had a much more sophisticated approach to earning money. These guides took us on tours that ended up in a gift store, where they expected us to buy artifacts in the store made by local artisans. I noticed that when we left; the guides had a few words with the owners of the stores, and my strong suspicion was that the guides received a kickback, a percentage of the amount we spent in the store.

Some of these guides are professional historians and provide excellent guided tours. But they are also aggressive in securing huge tips by shaming the Westerners, who are often seduced by suave guides with a suit and a tie on, university professors moonlighting as tour leaders.

I found group tours are better, in that they include tips in the price, although the guides always expect additional money.

Regardless of such annoyances, the Taj is a great place to visit. It is a unique building that has an eerie, light feeling in the sun and is surrounded by a well-maintained garden. When leaving, the guards at the gate told us that there are always lots of tourists there.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: