COVINGTON - James Howard Kunstler is wickedly funny and occasionally aggravating. He is also redeemed by being right most of the time.
Consider this moment. We are sitting in traffic on Fourth Street in Covington, near the intersection of Main Street.
I'm sure you know the spot. Just ahead is I-75 - freedom, of a sort - but traffic crawls along until you want to veer abruptly into the bowels of Covington, your knuckles white from loss of blood.
This is what we do at the intersection, anyway. Mr. Kunstler hates traffic, and he is from New York. We don't want to make him mad.
Roger Bell of the Covington Housing Department is at the wheel. Just before he gets us out of the jam, our companion pronounces Fourth and Main "a gruesome industrial intersection" and uses it to make a point.
"We've created a great deal of sheer ugliness around ourselves that is dehumanizing us," he says.
Count on James Kunstler to turn the average traffic pileup into a pre-apocalyptic event. Still - and here's the aggravating part - he's right. It is a gruesome intersection. I frequently feel less human there.
How did we get into such a sorry mess?
Mr. Kunstler has a few ideas. Many of them appear in his books, The Geography of Nowhere and Home From Nowhere, which he wrote after traveling the country as the common man's link to architects, planners and other "experts."
One of his conclusions: America is hurting because its homes and suburbs do not feed people's souls, and this is partly because they were built more for cars than humans.
In Mr. Kunstler's view, modern life is a horrorscape of fast-food restaurants, strip shopping centers surrounded by parking lots, and copy-cat houses with "cartoonish" features such as shutters that were never meant to close.
Americans drive everywhere. They do not walk to the post office or city hall or their workplace - perhaps meeting a neighbor along the way - because zoning laws have removed these features from walking distance.
A movement called New Urbanism wants to bring them back, and Mr. Kunstler is its cleverest spokesperson.
New Urbanism calls for mixed-use neighborhoods. Houses would not be so rigidly separated from corner grocery stores, restaurants, city halls, museums and the like. Single people might live in apartments above bookstores or tailor shops. Retired people might keep a closer eye on the community's children, because the beauty of the town or the city would make everyone feel, well . . . better. Kinder. More responsible.
Since publication of his books, Mr. Kunstler has become a "low-grade guru," as he calls it. He is besieged with speaking invitations from colleges and civic groups, and he happened to arrive in our area on just such a mission.
After giving a talk at Northern Kentucky University, he patiently allowed us to drive him around various gruesome intersections. Tell us, we said, what you see as the good, the bad and the unbearable.
On downtown Cincinnati:
"This metropolitan area, in a lot of ways, is in visibly better shape than a lot of other Midwestern cities that are completely dead. You know, Columbus has bulldozed about two square miles of its downtown, and Dayton (Ohio) is like The Day the Earth Stood Still. You go to Dayton and you expect mummies to be lurching around there. It's such a graveyard."
This is an old, grand neighborhood that has the benefit of a "connection to the civic life of the town." People can walk to the library or the grocery store for a quart of milk. Houses are built to last, with generous proportions. Neighborhoods like Mansion Hill could use more small, scattered parks, but children can still play in these kinds of streets, because they weren't laid out to assist cars in speeding.
Random comment on the phenonemon of the split-level home: "It's the housing equivalent of a cheese doodle."
On Mainstrasse in Covington:
"One of the cool things about Covington is it happens to have building stock from a really wonderful time in American construction. These are wonderful, solid brick buildings . . . . The scale is really sweet and comfortable and intimate. They're very nicely decorated, very nicely embellished, and they have real, enduring value."
On the Fort Wright city building:
"It's your basic off-the-shelf, strip-mall box," says Mr. Kunstler. "With a little portico on it," adds Mr. Bell, a fan of New Urbanism. "There's nothing there an 8-year-old couldn't draw."
On the upscale Ashley Ridge subdivision in Covington:
This is the typical cartoonish fantasy of country life, Mr. Kunstler says. The Ashley Ridge houses are more attractive than many he has seen, but their surroundings still do nothing to nourish the soul. "This is just a collection of houses plopped out in the woods. You can't buy a stick of gum here, you can't buy a newspaper here. Your kids have to be driven everywhere from here."
And so on.
In Northern Kentucky, of course, cookie-cutter suburbs are on a rampage, so Mr. Kunstler's criticism is particularly relevant. So are his musings on American democracy. It has evolved into American individualism, he says: a system "devoted to promoting individual liberty" and the pursuit of one's own happiness at any cost.
"It seems to me that such an extraordinary view of democracy is essentially absurd and cannot sustain communites," he writes in Home from Nowhere.
Now recall the debate in the city of Union, where people are moaning about a consultant's vision for the town's future.
The plan calls for pre-1940s architectural standards and zoning that ensures green space within subdivisions. The plan also would establish a town center with homes, government buildings and stores mixed together.
Instead of considering the potential improvement in Union's public space, people are hunkering down to protect their private ones. Developers might balk at the subdivision restrictions, making the land more difficult to sell, people say.
There he goes again: The American Individualist sallying forth, missing another opportunity to join his neighbors in deciding what makes a town beautiful.
At least we have James Howard Kunstler to remind us, in his charmingly irascible way.
With any luck, we'll get the message in time to prevent apocalypse by traffic jam.
Karen Samples is The Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. Her column appears on Sundays and Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. She can be reached at 578-5584 or email
her at ksamples@enquirer.com
SAMPLES ARCHIVE
