Impress the west

My parents returned to Denver yesterday after a lovely week-long visit. They were very impressed with Youngstown, particularly with the drive we took through Mill Creek Park. We also looked at plenty of lovely homes and downtown landmarks. I enjoyed sharing its history and sights with them, but the highlight was sharing its people.

We made an appearance at the Saturday TreezPlease gathering, where your humble narrator was quoted by a Vindicator reporter. Now, keep in mind my wife, Jaci, is on the board of TreezPlease while I'm the one who keeps showing up in the newspaper (as she pointed out to me). Ah well...

TreezPlease: it's the Bee's Knees

My family and I will be at TreezPlease's Common Ground celebration tomorrow. I hope to see you there!

Treez Please an area organization devoted to planting trees in Youngstown announced today that it will dedicate its first project on Saturday, Oct. 27. The project, named Common Ground, is located at the corner of Broadway and Kensington Avenues on the city’s North Side. The public is invited to visit the green space between 1 and 4 p.m. Light refreshments will be served; there will be activities for children, entertainment and fun for the entire family. For those who wish to participate, light work projects will also be taking place.

The members of Treez Please are dedicated to grassroots community greening, urban reforestation, education, and other initiatives that support better awareness of the connections between trees, people, and community. “Trees are primeval, they outlive us, because they are fixed they create a sense of permanence and stability in the community.” said Attorney Debra Weaver President of Treez Please.

Common Ground is the group’s first project consisting of two adjacent lots that have been planted with burr and red oak, black locust, dawn redwood, tulip, redbud and hawthorn. A central meadow will be installed to demonstrate the value of flowers and grasses for birds and pollinators.

According to Attorney Debra Weaver, president of Treez Please, “The event provides an opportunity for the community to learn more about the organization and its efforts to move Youngstown’s 2010 agenda forward through positive use of green space.”

The Folks

I'm very excited to share Youngstown with my parents over the coming week. They arrive tomorrow from Denver, and Jaci and I will finally get to celebrate our September anniversary with dinner and a movie while the grandparents watch the kids.

The last time my parents were here, I was at YSU. I think my dad came for a visit when I conducted Mozart's Requiem at St. John's. I'm sure there were other occasions, but I'm going to treat this as their first visit. I know Youngstown much better than I did back then, so I plan on giving the big tour and showing all the sites.

I'm also occupied working on the GreenEnergyTV site, waiting to finish a site for an organization back in Tucson, and working on the program for the upcoming Opera Western Reserve production of Rigoletto. You can bet I'll be taking breaks, though, to watch the Rockies-BoSox World Series!

Video: solar power on the Mall

Among other things, learn the difference between active and passive solar energy...

More at GreenEnergyTV.com.

Blog amnesty

I'd like to suggest that the Valley bloggers grant themselves blanket amnesty from having to apologize for not posting enough. It's never enough, is it? There are times when I've posted daily, and there are times (like the past two weeks) where I've barely managed one a week, if that. I find, however, that my best writing happens when I feel that I can share whatever I want, whenever I can.

We all have jobs, we all have lives. If you haven't posted something recently on your blog, I'm not going to assume it's because you don't care, and you don't owe me an apology. (I hope you feel the same way towards me!) When you are able to find time to post an entry, great! Just don't let it be an apology :-)

All of you bloggers are appreciated for your unique insights and approaches to talking about the Valley. Don't worry if you're not keeping the most regular of schedules. When you write it, we will come! (That's what RSS is for anyway...)

Keep up the good work!

Youngstown Osteopathic building gets new mission

There may be a subscription required to read this article from the Business Journal, but access is only $2.50 a month, so you can't really complain about that. Here are some of the interesting parts:

Minnesota developers who paid $1.25 million for the former Youngstown Osteopathic Hospital building on the city’s North Side expect to fill it up quickly with some of the region’s most effective nonprofit agencies.

Nonprofits will want to relocate there, says Craig Howse of Metro Development Properties in Minneapolis, because the new owner will discount the rent, allowing them to devote more resources to services instead of operating expenses. For some nonprofits that need extra help, the rent may drop to zero.

Nonprofit agencies need not apply. Tenancy will be by invitation only, and Metro Development staff has begun due diligence by meeting with agency leaders in the region. The three nonprofit agencies housed in the building – Head Start Food Service, Home Weatherization and the Women, Infants and Children’s nutrition program – will stay.

“The folks that are behind this don’t like drawing a lot of attention to themselves,” Howse explains. “Their vision is just to support organizations that are doing good work by providing them with facilities that underwrite and gird their work.”

Lease agreements typically include free or reduced rent, but the nonprofits pay a share of utility costs, maintenance and other operating expenses.

The building in Youngstown is one of three acquired more recently, one of which is another former hospital of similar size, the 230,000-square-foot Mount Sinai Hospital in Minneapolis. That building houses Hope Academy, a private, inner-city Christian school that Howse calls one of Metro Development’s greatest success stories; other nonprofit tenants will move in soon.

So why is this Minneapolis group coming to Youngstown? The hospital building was the initial draw, Howse relates, because Metro Development has found that former hospitals work well for its purposes. “When we did some research and we learned about the higher unemployment and saw some of the needs in the area, it made us feel even more certain that this would be a good thing,” he says.

So why is this Minneapolis group coming to Youngstown? The hospital building was the initial draw, Howse relates, because Metro Development has found that former hospitals work well for its purposes. “When we did some research and we learned about the higher unemployment and saw some of the needs in the area, it made us feel even more certain that this would be a good thing,” he says.

Cleanup Saturday

"The city is seeking volunteers for a citywide cleanup day to take place Saturday. Volunteers will be asked to remove litter, brush and debris and perform minimal grass cutting in neighborhoods on the North, South, East and West parts of town. All recyclable trash will be handled as such. The event is being organized by Youngstown Litter Control and Recycling and various city departments in cooperation with Youngstown State University and several local schools, churches and civic organizations. Volunteers will meet at 7:15 a.m. at the Chevrolet Centre, 229 E. Front St. The event will begin at 8 a.m. and end at noon. For more information, or to register for the event call (330) 744-7526."

Treez Weekend

In the midst of another Beauty & the Beast weekend at Powers, greenery will be happening. TreezPlease is in force Saturday morning starting at 10am, just three blocks east of Wick Park, at Broadway and Kensington (between Wick and Bryson). Here are the details:

Bring Tools, Gloves and a smile!

* Spread the load of soil to create an "experimental" (of limited area) meadow for flowers
* Obtain and plant mums in the front corner
* Saw and move dead trees
* Dig holes for the rest of the trees
* Lay down weed barrier and cover with wood chips (from house on Elm St) to create the walkway diagonally across the lot from the Southern edge on Kensington to the driveway at the Eastern edge of Broadway--- maybe another walkway from the corner of Kensington and Broadway to the center of the lot.
* Continue edging the rest of the sidewalk and driveways, then sweep clean; clean the street next to our curbs
* Dig out pieces of concrete and bricks that are only partly submerged in the soil
* Take off dead parts of the big tree

Download: UofM downtown presentations

Here are the presentations from the University of Michigan urban design students that came to town this summer.

GreenEnergyTV Introduction

Marin Alsop takes reins at Baltimore Symphony Orchestra

I've been looking forward to this for some time, following the story of the Bernstein protege and her ascendancy to the highest rank a woman conductor has achieved.

As director-designate Ms. Alsop reinvigorated the orchestra, institutionally and artistically. A born communicator and effective proselytizer for music, she has led a major community-outreach effort and taken the orchestra back into the recording business for the first time in a decade. A new Sony Classical release with Ms. Alsop conducting the violinist Joshua Bell and the Baltimore Symphony in John Corigliano’s “Red Violin” Concerto took the top spot on the Billboard classical chart in September. The Naxos label plans to release a three-disc set of Dvorak symphonies taken from live performances by Ms. Alsop and the orchestra.

Thanks to a $1 million grant, the Baltimore Symphony this season is offering all tickets to subscribers at $25 a concert. In a new venture, XM Satellite Radio is broadcasting eight Baltimore Symphony programs this season. Attendance, which had dipped to about 60 percent of capacity before Ms. Alsop’s appointment, is confidently expected to reach the high 70 percent range. Paul Meecham, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, has said Ms. Alsop was the impetus for the turnaround, proving that dynamic artistic leadership is the obvious answer to the troubles facing American orchestras.

I think it proves more than this. Something Youngstown has ignored--at its peril--is focusing on its city as the place where it does business. First, it recently appointed a music director based in L.A.!? Randall Craig Fleischer is flown in for work and then back home. For recent percussion auditions, he couldn't even be bothered to actually come to Youngstown; they were held in Cleveland! If an orchestra is to succeed, the music director must be an active part of the community, reaching out and making connections. The audience for the Youngstown Symphony isn't savvy enough, I fear, to know the difference between a good and a mediocre interpretation--or even performance--of, say, Brahms's First Symphony. What they need to see is someone young and dynamic who is making appearances and making a name in the community.

I believe that American orchestras won't really be successful until the organizations take a page out of the playbook of popular entertainment. It's about stars. And not just the maestro. The symphony should be promoting its players as individuals: talking about their appearances, promoting their individual ensembles. Chamber music is more portable and can happen all over town. When the people throughout the community see and hear these musicians and know they're part of the symphony, that can bring them to Powers/DeYor for the concerts. Not to mention the musicians need the exposure to supplement their paltry symphony salaries.

Finally, Ms. Alsop is doing what must be done in today's concert halls: playing music by living composers. Audiences need to be reminded that this stuff is relevant. Unfortunately, of the six Masterworks series concerts on the Youngstown Symphony's schedule this year, only half feature performances by living composers. Not nearly enough.

Urban renaissance

Ed Morrison posted this article, which is well worth a read:

it is clear that a massive urban renaissance is in full flight, with city after city reporting floods of suburbanites moving to city living.

In the States, the population equivalent of two New York Cities move annually from rural to urban areas! With this return to city living, the business improvement district (BID) movement (in our case, city improvement district or CID), is taking off - not only in numbers (New York City now has 61), but in the range and depth of services provided.

There is a sense of confidence in cities that I haven't experienced in the past 20 years. Gone are the days of "clean and safe" being the only focus for BIDs; now they have lifted their sights and are becoming major partners with city governments in making cities livable.

So, this is encouraging. Even more exciting are new regulations enforcing sustainable building codes:

"Green" and "sustainable" are no longer buzzwords - the designers of Manhattan's skyscrapers look for choices that will make their buildings as energy efficient and environmentally friendly as possible. Traditional materials are giving way to those that are specifically produced for the new green era and whose production systems themselves are free of pollution processes.

Within a matter of years, it will not be possible to have plans passed in NYC unless there is total conformance with the new "green" codes that are required to be met before the buildings can be certified for occupation.