Utilitarian
AT&T generously provides pristine white surfaces for local first-graders or aspiring Golden Paintbrush Award winners to transform into community art, and all the Old West Side can do is complain about the alleged “monstrosities.”
AT&T generously provides pristine white surfaces for local first-graders or aspiring Golden Paintbrush Award winners to transform into community art, and all the Old West Side can do is complain about the alleged “monstrosities.”
The Old West siders are good at complaining…This one takes the cake though. Someone wants to beautify something in AA and OWS sees the glass as half empty. These people need anti-dpressants now!
posted by CB on July 3rd, 2007 at 12:54 pmWell, I was kind of kidding about the art. Seems like the natural outcome in A2, though.
posted by ann arbor is overrated on July 3rd, 2007 at 1:02 pmWoah, a triple negative:
“In Madison, Wis., the mayor has called the large AT&T boxes “graffiti magnets'’ and is trying to stop legislation that would hinder that city’s chances of blocking them from being installed.”
posted by Bruce Fields on July 3rd, 2007 at 1:35 pmThere is one around the corner from my (non-OWS) house. It’s really ugly. I’m glad it’s not on my property.
Also, it’s “whoa.” One of my pet peeves.
posted by Chris on July 3rd, 2007 at 1:40 pmah yes chris, but is it said like joey lawrence or more like david spade? does the vocalization even matter? should i be smacked for a joey lawrence reference. most assuredly.
posted by TD on July 3rd, 2007 at 1:45 pm“‘I would like to see people in the city unite and tell AT&T that this isn’t how you do business in Ann Arbor,’ Eckstein said last week. ”
We’re Ann Arbor. We’re important. We deserve special treatment. OMG.
There have always been utility boxes around. Are these different from the usual ones? Yeah they aren’t that attractive, but they are good for fliering on and seem like a usual fact of life in the city. People in my neighborhood aren’t complaining about the elevated train tracks or other things which are surely much more disruptive.
posted by Brandon on July 3rd, 2007 at 2:16 pmall i can say is…a little graffiti is a hell of a lot better than millions upon millions of flyers. Talk about an eyesore and a waste of paper.
posted by dan on July 3rd, 2007 at 2:21 pm“There have always been utility boxes around. Are these different from the usual ones? ”
They are bigger, and they are throughout the city in ways that the signal boxes for traffic lights are not — that is, on smaller sidestreets, etc.
posted by Chris on July 3rd, 2007 at 2:51 pmI would have gone with “Woe, a triple negative.”
posted by Parking Structure Dude! on July 3rd, 2007 at 3:51 pmAnd of course, everyone bitching about the phone boxes communicates via semaphore.
Right?
posted by The Squid on July 3rd, 2007 at 8:27 pmThe White Stripes, Cream’s “White Room”, Melville’s White Whale…I’m waiting for the definitive song or story about the White Boxes.
posted by David Boyle on July 3rd, 2007 at 8:40 pm“Right?”
–
|
/
|\
-
/
\|
posted by Bruce Fields on July 3rd, 2007 at 9:14 pm\|
posted by The Squid on July 4th, 2007 at 12:26 am_
/
/|
/\
|
/
_
\
I just think it’s hysterical that the Old West Side is reputed to be so ‘beautiful’ to begin with. I’ve never in my life seen such a chaos of badly done additions, poor original design, bizarre attempts at historical copies. It’s just a hodge podge of funny little houses. Quasi Tudor sits slap up against pseudo New England which almost overruns boxy ’70s . . . it hurts my eyes to the point of bringing on a migrane. It looks like Ann Arbor couldn’t decide who it is, so it took a nibble from every culture on Earth and put the pieces down on the west side of town. The phone boxes would hardly be noticed.
posted by LittleB on July 4th, 2007 at 9:12 pmHey, it’s not as ugly as the strip malls.
posted by Pants Rule on July 4th, 2007 at 11:21 pmOr the freaking subdivisions where all the houses match. Too much matching is uglier than the randomness, to me anyway.
posted by Chris on July 5th, 2007 at 9:33 amThe Old West Side was the traditionally German neighborhood of Ann Arbor, and certainly not upscale: small, plain wooden houses along numbered streets in low-lying ground, just over the railroad tracks from downtown. As recently as the 1990 census, the OWS had by far the highest percentage of German ethnics of any Ann Arbor census tract.
You might think that German immigrants would bring a distinctive Germanic architecture to their settlements, but there is little evidence of that here or elsewhere.
What happened is that when the neighborhood became trendy, the new residents weren’t satisfied with 600 square foot cottages, and the historic district ordinance in Ann Arbor didn’t hold them to that size. Hence, the neighborhood has many small old houses with big new additions in the back.
Realty agents have applied the term “Old West Side” to a vast area, but if you consider only the historic district itself, the architecture is pretty consistently early 20th century vernacular houses, neoclassical/colonial in inspiration and detail, e.g., front porches with round Doric columns. Here and there are exceptions, but (as a couple people noted above) variety is the spice of streetscapes. Lots of mature hardwood trees help, too.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on July 5th, 2007 at 10:25 amas the article alludes, all these big phone boxes going up are there to support att’s triple-play tv/internet/phone u-verse service. what they do is run fiber to the new phone boxes, then run copper from the phone boxes to customer premises. the reason that there are so many of the things is that, to get high data rates over what is basically category 1 twisted pair cable, you need really short spans of less than a few thousand feet. ergo, you’ll soon enough be seeing one of these boxes every block or so - in urban areas that are lucky enough to receive the high-speed service.
i guess we should be happy with what we’ve got but i personally am frustrated by the large phone boxes more for the reason that this is actually - in traditional ameritech/sbc/att style - the cheap way to do next-generation networking. if ann arbor happened to be territory in which verizon was the ilec, we could instead get the nifty fios fiber-to-the-home service. data rates would be much faster, and there would be no need for the dsl muxes every block or two. unfortunately, fiber to the premises is a bit more expensive to roll out - far be it from att to invest in their network beyond the minimum necessary.
as for all these old wank, er, west siders.. i assume they’d rather pull their old modems out of the closet and surf the web that way? now that’s tech-savvy.
posted by stc on July 5th, 2007 at 3:26 pmWe already know that the neighborhoods hate sophisticated technology.
posted by Dale on July 6th, 2007 at 5:12 amhttp://www.annarborisoverrated.com/2004/10/25/internet-killed-the-letter-writing-star/
They don’t make threads like they used to.
posted by Taylor on July 6th, 2007 at 2:39 pm@Chris: “Woah” is the sound the dog Snowy made in the old Tin-Tin comics.
posted by Daniel on July 6th, 2007 at 9:47 pmI just ran to my copy of “Tintin in Tibet”, hoping for vindication. Alas, I found that Snowy consistently says “wooah” throughout. Which I suspect is an entirely different thing. The captain, on the other hand (in a cow-riding scene near the start) says “whoa”. So I’m afraid Hergé (or his translators) are not on my side.
In French Milou says “wouah”, for what that’s worth.
posted by Bruce Fields on July 6th, 2007 at 11:04 pmaaisoverrated has become so overrelevant.
If any of you actually studied or have been around long enough to have observed, it will take more than some spunky but ill informed urban planning kids sheepishly following and fawning over some new trendy urban planning guru’s latest proclamation on how to construct “community” or a “neighborhood” to change the unique character if this place.
Witness the laughable “New West SIde”.
You cannot buy or replicate on a “Plan” the distinctive nature or history Ann Arbor’s OWS.
posted by mucho gusto on August 1st, 2007 at 6:17 pm