Friday evening we went down to Books & Books in Coral Gables to hear Witold Rybczynski talk about his new book Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities.
His main thesis was that developers have replaced planners as the shapers of our cities, and he didn't seem too upset about this. Planners, he said, have done a terrible job.
Looking at cities historically, he noted that many of the founding fathers were developers. American cities, like Philadelphia (where he now lives) started with grandiose plans - well-laid out with parks - but then we got lazy. The City Beautiful movement at the beginning of the 20th century was a great urban movement but after the war, we tried "to reinvent the city" and that was "a fiasco." He said that the New Urbanism movement of the late 20th Century has actually had its greatest successes outside of cities, causing Vincent Scully to dub it the "New Suburbanism."
During the question-and-answer period, a few people spoke about Miami. (Questions to authors are often just statements, and rarely succinct.) One woman expressed her delight at living in a bilingual city but her frustration with the people in power. A man wondered if the protests in Cairo would be taking place if there were no Tahrir Square. He added that, during the Elian Gonzalez controversy, Cubans had to gather at Versailles restaurant because Miami had no comparable meeting place.
After the talk, Hania and I ate supper in the bookstore courtyard, where we ran into a landscape architect we know from Ft. Lauderdale. (Hitesh had not come for the talk, simply the ambiance of a meal outside, in a lively urban setting, on a beautiful February night.) We walked across the street to the new Coral Gables Cinemateque, where young people in T-shirts, holding dogs on leashes, collected money for animal rescue. (The theater was showing My Dog Tulip.)
We took a stroll up to Giralda, one block of which was closed to traffic, the street filled with people sitting at tables from the many restaurants. We asked two policemen what was going on, and they told us that this happens the first Friday of every month. In fact, they said, there was a push to close the street to traffic permanently. Rybczynski had mentioned that pedestrian streets never work, except in tourist cities and college towns. Coral Gables is both. Mayor Don Slesnick, you've now heard it from a leading authority on cities.
In Philadelphia over the holidays I visited an apartment that had something many Florida apartments lack: books. There was a mix of fiction and nonfiction (a good number of them books that had been "talked about") and nothing that could be defined as junk. I was immediately impressed by the owner's tastes.
Then I saw what wasn't there. No books published before the mid-20th century. No sections devoted to a particular subject, or author. (No favorite authors that I could see.) Nothing obscure or arcane. Every book, I suddenly realized, had been purchased as a result of a respected book review's (probably the Times') stamp of approval. It was the library of someone who had read everything she had been told to read, and - in the course of that reading - had developed no literary tastes of her own. It was such an unadulterated collection of accomplished contemporary writing that it resembled bad writing in its lack of a surprise and individuality.
A book is a house - a mansion - for words; a Kindle is a rented, unfurnished apartment.
The opening this past weekend of Books & Books in downtown Ft. Lauderdale had special meaning for me, not just because I was one of the invited authors, or because I love bookstores, but because it was something I had long been an advocate for.
At the Sun-Sentinel I would occasionally write columns pointing out the deficiencies of my hometown - the most obvious one, to me at least, was the absence of a downtown bookstore. (Liberties, which existed for a short while on Las Olas, specialized in magazines and paperbacks with elevated letters on their covers.) This absence became even more striking when all the luxury condos went up and the new residents, people who had paid handsomely for the amenities of urban living, discovered that they could not walk to a bookstore. A good bookstore, I argued, did more than sell books; it offered a meeting place, it served as a kind of community center.
My last column on the subject detailed a remake of the Riverfront mall, filling it with tapas bars, an art movie house, and - at its heart - a branch of Books & Books, with a courtyard and musicians in the evening. This column elicited a letter from a reader who suggested that I "take my tapas and art films and jump in the New River."
The new Books & Books is a block from the Riverfront, in the lobby of the Museum of Art. It has a cafe and is planning to host events, not just readings but music as well. Fort Lauderdale finally has what it has long lacked. Now we get to see if we deserve it.
I love bookstores. Not the chains - Barnes & Noble assaulting you at the entrance with the device that's going to make bookstores extinct - but independent and used book stores.
And no bookstore has more meaning for me than Fort Lauderdale's The Bookshop (formerly Hittel's). It was always an anomaly - a cluttered warren of classics in a Florida beach town - which made it all the more precious. One evening in the fall of 2003 I had a party there for the publication of my second book, over 50 people filling the front room and spilling out into the parking lot. A few years later I stood and read from the upstairs balcony while being filmed by a cameraman from Book-TV. The piece, fittingly, was about book readings, and afterward the man hung around and filmed an interview with the owner, Rob Hittel.
Rob eventually handed the store over to the two women who worked for him, and they made a valiant effort. But the business - never robust in the best of times - was flattened by the one-two punch of technology and recession. I stopped in last Thursday afternoon and Nancy told me I was the first customer of the day. "And this is normally our busiest time!" she said. She asked me for the name of someone at the paper to contact about her liquidation sale.
When an old man dies, it is said, a library burns. What happens when a used bookstore dies?
Yes. The woman on the stationary bike finished War and Peace and is now reading Don Quixote. Never again will I complain about unbookish neighbors.