I wrote the essay below, "Grit Makes Cities Great", eight years ago after moving from the gritty streets of the original megalopolis - Metro New York/New Jersey - to the tropical megalopolis of South Florida. Now, as I'm weeks away from moving to yet another megapolitan area, my first on the West Coast, I thought I'd re-post it. I don't know why, but I have a feeling I'll find grit in SoCal, even though I plan on spending much of my time above the clouds hiking the Transverse and Peninsular ranges.
Grit Makes Cities Great
Originally published in Tongue Twisted Traveler blog, summer 2004
For the past year, since my return to Miami after a two-year stint in Newark, I've been looking for signs of a mature city, something that would draw memories of the Northeast. I came south to escape the snow, but I'm really missing the grit of a city with some miles on her. In Miami, so much of history lies in the last 50 years, and the focus is more directed to one glaring aspect--its chance relationship with the cold war and growth as a transnational suburb in exile of Havana--while tourism has flourished to disguise this fact to the rest of the country. There is also a visible history here, from 20th Century architecture to a unique blending of Latin American nationalities. But Newark, which has lived a sort of transnational existence itself, hosting wave after wave of newly arrived immigrants throughout each of the American centuries, is somehow more deeply layered, more complex.
Newark, arguably the downtown of metro New Jersey, has a tight, defined city center, with brick buildings dating back to the 1600s, interspersed with structures of varying degrees of modernity and use, and roads leading out in all directions to cities of major importance to both the colonial and industrial eras. Major routes run in eight directions: north through Passaic, Paterson and Hackensack; northeast through Union City, West New York and the Bronx; east through Jersey City, Manhattan and Brooklyn; southeast through Bayonne and Staten Island, south through Elizabeth, New Brunswick and Perth Amboy; southwest through the Plainfields; west through Irvington, Summit and Morristown; and northwest through the Oranges, Bloomfield and Montclair.
Built up before cars and trucks came to clog northeast Jersey's network of roads, Newark, as a city in constant evolution and transition, has an urban landscape that came alive during industrialization and all but died in the wake of suburbanization. The highways here were built as afterthoughts, along rivers, through blighted neighborhoods and atop long bridges of rusting steel. Roads curve and dip, one below the other, emerging again out of cold, cracked cement marked sporadically with graffiti and stained with chemical runoff. In the midst of all this, a new urbanism is taking place that does little to sweep aside the scars characteristic of such a harsh history, so they remain visible, unique marks of progress for current generations to marvel, to learn from and to admire.
Miami, too, has its history, its unique built environment, its culture. But one must look harder to see it, study more deeply to understand it and ultimately be willing to go off the beaten path to discover what lies beneath its glossy skin. While geography won't permit such a radiant existence for Miami--the Everglades hem in the west, the Keys are the end of the road just a few hundred miles to the south, and in the east there is just blue ocean, with paths only known to ships and sailing vessels--the city radiates in other ways. Within these natural boundaries a city has formed with distinct design. Above the surface, it seems Miami is jailed within an inflexible grid, with Miami Avenue on the x axis and Flagler on the y. But on the ground there is variation as the Miami River, Biscayne Bay and an old network of canals, as well as the Interstate 95 and several freeways, cut off parts of each quadrant at irregular intervals that defy logic or reason. Through it all, neighborhoods survive in a sort of organized chaos among the constant beauty of sky, plants and water even as half-century old cement structures in some places beg for paint and a little more care.
For better or for worse, redevelopment is underway in select neighborhoods of both Newark and Miami. Their characters will evolve, as Miami sets to open its doors on a new cultural center and opera house and Newark works to expand its subway and light rail network. But what makes the future for each of these cities so interesting are the roots of their respective pasts. So I'll keep on searching for grit in Miami, because I know it's there. It's in Overtown and Liberty City, Opa Locka and Hialeah. I've seen it in Allapattah and Little Havana, too. Hell, it's even in Coral Gables, Coconut Grove and Miami Beach, if you know where to look. So Miami may never compare to the great cities of the northeast, just as U.S. cities could never compare to the great gritty cities of Europe. But in time Miami's own brand of grit will become fully known, and it will truly earn its position as one of the great cities of the Americas.
