Category Archives: Cousins’ Trip

A Paris Neighborhood & Jane Jacobs

Architecture, Cousins' Trip, Travel

It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist’s studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan. Julian Barns

The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

During our short stay in Paris, Michele and I stayed in a small hotel that had been refurbished, sort of near the Arc de Triomphe. It was in a mixed, gentrifying neighborhood. For me, it was the best part of the trip. We took a cab from the train station to the hotel, but just before we got to the hotel, the driver pulled over in what I would call a seedy area and said something in French that meant, I think, “Here is your destination.” It wasn’t, and after some pseudo-conversation which included pointing at various smartphone pages, he said something like “Oh” in French, turned the corner, and drove another three blocks to our hotel.

It was no longer 100°F, but I was still whooped when we first got to Paris. I opted for a day of doing nothing. Michele wandered around the neighborhood in the morning and then returned to the hotel to pick me up for lunch at Restaurant Le Merrill. Restaurant Le Merrill is just a run-of-the-mill French restaurant, which means the lunch was super. Then we spent the afternoon wandering around the area.

As we wandered around this neighborhood, I kept thinking of Jane Jacobs. This neighborhood is exactly what she had promoted. Around the middle of the last century, urban planning became a hot topic, involving the demolition of slums and their replacement with large, planned developments. In the United States, Frank Lloyd Wright designed and promoted Broadacre City, and in France, Le Corbusier designed the Radiant City. Robert Moses, an urban planner in New York, was one of the most powerful advocates of large-scale projects that destroyed vibrant neighborhoods.

As an aside, among other atrocities committed by Moses in the name of civic improvement, the Cross Bronx Expressway displaced nearly 4,000 families, not counting the families impacted by the increased noise, as it cut a seven-mile gash through the Bronx. End aside.

In the United States, at the time, areas considered slums ripe for improvement due to narrow streets and old, often rundown, buildings included North Beach in San Francisco, the North End in Boston, Georgetown in Washington, and Greenwich Village in Manhattan. All four of those areas are now considered highly desirable places to live, partially due to Jane Jacobs. Greenwich Village and its planned destruction by the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway is where Jane Jacobs stopped Robert Moses and changed urban planning forever, well, at least for the past 75 years. At the time, Jacobs was dismissively referred to as a “housewife”; now she is considered one of the most influential people in urban planning in the 20th century. She wrote a book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which basically said that everything Robert Moses said and did was wrong.

Jane Jacobs said that destroying a rundown neighborhood was wrong, a crime. As I recall, she believed that the tuberculosis rate in a neighborhood was a more accurate indicator of a community’s health than the condition of its buildings. She thought neighborhoods were organic, writing, Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. 

She was for wide sidewalks, narrow streets, and diversity both in its buildings and inhabitants.

(The déjà vu of) Driving To Lyon Through A Stunning Landscape

Cousins' Trip, Travel

But first, an aside, France is modern. Even the electric outlets look modern, and the cars even more so. End aside.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime. Mark Twain

Almost a week ago, we drove from Die to Lyon. We drove the long way, up a valley into the mountains, over a pass – well, through a tunnel about 500 feet below the actual pass – down the valley to the north, and across some rolling foothills, and then across the mostly flatlands into the industrial part of Lyon.

As we headed up, the road was steep with lots of switchbacks, but after the tunnel, the descent was more gradual, somewhat like going over the Sierras from east to west, but not as extreme. We passed through several small, picturesque villages, and I started thinking about a conversation I had at our re-u with one of the hosts.

I had said that the village we had visited was beautiful, and she responded that every place in France was beautiful. I retorted that every place is beautiful, meaning that every natural place I have been that hasn’t been desecrated by the overlay of civilization is beautiful. I remember being in a drizzling rain that smelled of cow shit in Amarillo, Texas – coincidencly on the way to another family re-u – and thinking the Texas plains are the uglyest place I’ve ever been. The next day, we went for a walk in a private park – yes, Texas has private parks – that celebrated the Texas plains, and remarked to Michele on the stunning beauty.

But our host was right, in France, at least in this part of the country, the overlay of civilization is softer and more integrated into the landscape.

As we got to the base of the mountains, I had an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. It felt like driving out of the Sierra Nevada mountains on Highway 120. We would drop down the Old Priest grade and the air would warm, then into the valley made by the Tuolumne River before it was filled by a lake made by a worthless dam, then the land would flatten, and then, just west of Escalon, in the heat, we would drive on a narrow section of road through the almond groves. It didn’t look the same, but it did feel the same (except for the hayfields).

Cité de l’Automobile, Musée Nationale, Collection Schlumpf

Cars, Cousins' Trip

I want to tell a story but I don’t know where to put it in context, so I’ll start with the story as an aside. There are a lot of different species of beetles in the world, more than any other species, by far. There are probably more than 400,000 species of beetles, compared to only about 9,000 species of birds. This story is attributed to various people but, in Quote Investigator, they attribute it to British biologist, J.B.S. Haldane: who found himself in the company of a group of theologians. On being asked what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation, Haldane is said to have answered, ‘God has an inordinate fondness for beetles.’” End aside. 

Stephen Jay Gould wrote that there are two basic kinds of museums in the world, the old-fashioned museum that is a collection of stuff and the new kind of museum that has much less stuff but much more explanation. As I remember, he used the example of a Natural History Museum in Pennsylvania that had replaced a display of thousands of beetles, all found within a 60-mile radius of the museum, with a couple of the more impressive beetles and a large plastic model of a beetle showing how the hard covering over the wings works. The original museum implied the incredible variety of beetles while the new museum had a note that said there were more species of beetles than members of any other group in the animal kingdom. 

The Mercedes Museum in Stuttgart is a great example of the new museum and almost every museum in France is an example of the old-fashioned museum. The Eauze Musée Archéologique Le Trésor d’Eauze, in Southwestern France – shown in the top picture – which has hundreds, maybe thousands, of Roman coins lined up on shelves with almost no explanation, is a good example. Of course, the Louvre is another example; and the Cité de l’Automobile, Collection Schlumpf, Musée Nationale in Mulhouse, France, is still another..in this case an example on steroids.  

The name says it all – and, I hope, the picture above does also. This is a city of automobiles, the biggest collection of cars in the world (mostly French cars, and, really, mostly Buggatis and racing cars). Now the collection is a French National Museum although it is run by Culturespaces, who says they are the leading private cultural operator in the management of monuments, museums, art centres, temporary exhibitions, and immersive digital exhibitions. The whole experience is very French starting with a new bridge and entry to the museum which is still housed in an old warehouse and then entering the actual inner sanctum itself through a red curtain. 

The Collection itself was started by two brothers Hans and Fritz Schlumpf who were Swiss citizens but lived in the French city of Mulhouse. In the mid-1930s, they invested in a wool spinning mill, eventually took it over, and, over the next 40 years, they bought out most of the rival mills in the area becoming very rich in the process. Both brothers,  but Fritz especially, were collectors. Fritz started with stamps, then tin soldiers, and finally, cars.

There collecting started slowly, in the 50s when a lot of people were selling their old 30s cars during the post-war boom, and then picked up steam in the summer of 1960 with the purchase of 40 cars including ten Bugattis, three Rolls-Royces, two Hispano-Suizas, and one Tatra. 


During the next 15 years, Fritz bought everything he could get his hands on and, as word of the collection grew among  car people, he was able to buy some usually unavailable cars, most of the French Gordini racing cars in existence, several retired Ferrari racing cars from the factory, a couple of race cars from Mercedes, and several Lotuses from the private collection of racing driver Jo Siffert. At one point, Fritz sent a letter to every member of the Buggati Registry offering to buy their cars, in any shape. 

By the mid-60s, the collection had grown quite big and the brothers housed it in a former mill that also housed a large restoration facility and, more or less, kept it out of sight. Even though the Schlumpf mills were losing market share, mostly to plants in Asia, they continued to buy cars many of them financed by selling defunct plants and equipment. By 1976, the changing world caught up with the Schlumpf brothers and they started laying off workers. In March of 1977, after several strikes, the workers broke into the factory only to be surprised by a huge collection of cars. Everything went downhill fast from there ending with the brothers fleeing to Switzerland and the French government impounding the cars for back taxes. Since then, the collection has gone through a series of quasi-private owners ending with Culturespaces which enlarged the collection with the addition of cars from the French National Collection.  

As we got to the end of this huge warehouse, filled with cars, we began to think it was not as huge as we first thought because the entire end wall was a mirror. Except that, behind the mirror, was another room filled with race cars.

I have always thought that, if I had to come down on one side or the other of the old new/museum world, I would come down on the old museum side. Now I am not sure, Michele and I were getting pretty burned out on cars by now, and we had skipped whole rows. Now, at last, we had pretty much come to the end…

except there was a whole nother warehouse filled with luxury cars. This is like the Louvre of car collections and like the Louvre, it goes on forever. The last space, for a reason unknown to me, is much darker than the main room or the racecar room, and walking into it is slightly disorienting. 

We cruised through the last room, only stopping briefly to look at cars that deserved much more attention including TWO Bugatti Royales. One of which is the Coupé Napoléon, one of Ettore Bugatti’s personal cars (one of 18 bought from the family in 1963).   

When we spent the afternoon at the Mercedes Museum, I felt we had pretty much seen it. Would I go back, if I were in the area? definitely but, if I never go back, that’s fine. The Cité de l’Automobile, however, is different. I felt like we just scratched the surface and we were, if not exhausted, pretty tired. It seems to me that the difference between the”old” museum and the “new” museum is who is being serviced (OK, I know this word doesn’t really work, but entertained doesn’t work either, maybe nourished). New museums are trying to teach their visitors, the assumption is that the visitor doesn’t know much about the subject, while old-style museums are more elitist, they assume that the visitor already knows about the subject and they present the material in a way that deepens the visitor’s understanding. That may or may not be true for us after visiting the Cité de l’Automobile, but one thing I now know for sure; The Schlumpf brothers had an inordinate fondness for cars. 

Hanging Out with Foreigners

Cousins' Trip

This trip would not have been possible without the generosity of Michele’s extended family starting with Martina and Christian Stabenow and their family who hosted the cousins’ get together in Schifferstadt, Germany. After the Re-U – to blatantly rip off Neal Stephenson’s term for a family reunion – Michele and I went to Strasburg for a couple of days and then we spent a night with Martina and Christian’s daughter, Uli, and her husband Timmy. Then it was back to Martina and Christian’s for two nights when we came back to Germany to see the qualifying for the German Grand Prix. Staying with a German family, even for a few days was great fun and gave us access into German private life that we wouldn’t have otherwise had. 

Both of the places we stayed were in small villages and one of the biggest surprises – to me – was that the villages were dense and discrete, at the edge of the village, the farming country started, Bam! just like that, unlike here where small towns seem to fade into the surrounding countryside. When we went for a walk, we were in the village and then in the country. It is very human-friendly. As an aside, I think the Europeans are much more serious about protecting their environment than we are. They had way more solar panels on roofs than we do and France had windmills everywhere.  End aside.

And, now, a couple of non sequiturs: the German toilets have the water tank in the wall (which, as a builder, I found very interesting and kinda confounding) and the cousins use different kitchen appliances than we do. Martina had a meat slicer like I’ve only seen in a deli here, that made thin slices (to be politically correct, I should probably say that it was Christian’s also, but the slicer did seem to be Martina’s). Uli had a Thermomix gizmo that, according to their website, combines twelve appliances into one with functions that include weighing, mixing, chopping, milling, kneading, blending, steaming, cooking, whisking, precise heating, stirring and emulsifying.  

In France, we stayed with Cousin Marion who showed us a corner of France we probably never would have seen otherwise and, I have to say, it is a corner I loved. Visiting Marion was fascinating, she was born in England but has worked most of her life as a photo-journalist in – among other places – South Africa, Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, Portugal and, now, France. She photographed Jerry Brown and Linda Ronstadt in Kenya and spent five months on one of the last working Arab dhows as it sailed around the Middle East (and she wrote a super book about the adventure). Marion took us to Auch to see the unusual Cathedral – unusual,but not bad unusual, it is a Gothic Cathedral with a Renaissance front – and treated us to one of our best meals on the trip, lunch at a small hotel nearby. 

To finish our trip, we ditched the rental car and stayed at Cousin Claude’s home, in Paris (while she, as a proper Parisian, spent the summer out of town). It was an extraordinarily generous offer, a great opportunity, and a spectacular way to end our trip. 

 

Hello Reykjavik, Goodby Reykjavik

Cousins' Trip
We blew through Reykjavik so fast the only reason I know for sure we were there is that I have a couple of photos. We got in late, spent about two hours trying to get our rental car and got into town about 11:00 PM – in broad daylight – after all the restaurants were closed (except, fortunately, a sandwich shop). The next morning, we wandered down to a working harbor, ate an early lunch, and flew home.