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OH, WHO ARE THE PEOPLE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD? by Gregory Saville
Movie night - watching movies on our neighbor's garage door
Seasonal celebrations are now underway. Winter Solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and National Don't Make Your Bed Day (Yes, there is such a thing! I'm a believer). Each event celebrates a different aspect of life – seasonal, religious, cultural – and, in so doing, each celebrates our human community. Given the mess that is 2020 - inequity protests around the world, the Racial Reckoning riots in the United States, and the scourge of COVID-19 - we desperately need to celebrate something this year!
Human "community" is an elusive animal. It means different things to different people, and consequently, it means nothing that you can put your finger on. Of course, since we're not testing a theory in a lab experiment, who cares? It's okay that we have regular celebrations of community; it's needed now more than ever.
To some, "community" is their immediate family and circle of friends. (I've been particularly lucky in this regard.) For others, it is their social circle or their affiliation with sports teams. To yet others, it is those who share political affinities or who occupy the thousands of groups in Meetup.com.
TO EACH, HIS-HER OWN
For my part, I recently became obsessed with a YouTube group that takes virtual rides on famous trains around the world (yes, yes… I know how pathetic and uncool that sounds. COVID cabin fever takes a toll!)
Yet there is another important part of this story worth telling. For those of us in the community-building and crime prevention world, the term "community" is too elusive. We prefer using local geography to describe our neighborhood – those buildings, neighbors, parks, shops, and other places within a 15-minute walk of our home. After all, it is within those neighborhoods where we actually live much of our lives.
Our immediate neighbors, for better or worse, matter a great deal! And it is in those very places where we experience, recover from, or hide from, crime and fear. Mateja Mihinjac and I describe some of these ideas in our Third Generation CPTED article last year.
A pre-Covid, summer afternoon with neighbors
Neighborhoods matter and neighbors matter. So let's celebrate our neighbors too during this holiday season. I've been fortunate to have some great neighbors over the years. We may not always agree about politics or see eye-to-eye on our philosophy of life, but we agree it is important to be a good neighbor. When neighborliness works well, it costs you little, it means a lot, and it contributes to your quality of life. In an upcoming blog, Mateja will describe how we encourage neighborhood engagement. In the meantime, let's celebrate our neighbors.
To the great neighborhoods and to the great neighbors who care, thanks. You rock!
BUSTING THE BLUE BABBLE - POLICE MYTHS PREVENTING REFORM by Gerard Cleveland & Gregory Saville
Doing it right! Residents and police work together in Ottawa to create crime-solving plans
by Gerard Cleveland and Gregory Saville
NOTE: My colleague Gerard Cleveland and I co-wrote this second part of last week's blog on "Defund the Police". Gerry is a frequent contributor to the SafeGrowth blog. He is an attorney, a specialist in school violence, and the co-chair of the Police Society for Problem-Based Learning.
Occasionally, SafeGrowth programmers benefit from exceptional problem-solving police officers. Other times they get little help from the police. When that happens, residents ask questions such as: Where are the police? Why are we spending so much on policing services? What is wrong?
Why does a disconnect exist between what works to make communities safe and what currently occurs within policing? In our view, the systemic blockages first emerge within the academy. And since training serves as the entry point to police subculture, we must start reforms at that early stage if we hope to create a different style of police service.
Fear of crime is a major problem in many cities. Police can work with residents and other professionals to improve the quality of life ... but this depends on proper police training.
THE ROLE OF TRAINING
Over the past twenty-five years, we have taught thousands of police, federal agents, military units, and security personnel from across the globe. We find a disturbing commonality exists among most police training academies from places as diverse as the United States, Canada, Australia, Mozambique, Papua New Guinea or Qatar.
Why disturbing? Because most policing academies today hold four prevalent and dangerous myths. Police leaders and academy directors think these myths are unassailable truths. They are wrong.
POLICE TRAINING MYTH #1
Academy instructors have no choice but to lecture to ensure that they get as much information to the recruits as possible. They do not have time to do otherwise. They must follow legally prescribed, State and Federal regulations and therefore lecturing serves as the most expedient method to get all the required information to the recruits. They assure everyone that they would like to do more adult learning and problem-solving in the classroom, but such efforts "take too much time."
This "no time to train properly" mantra undermines the long-term success of new employees. If the objectives of the academy genuinely state a clear intention to focus on student learning, then agency and academy leaders must abandon their ineffective instructor-focused lessons and institute problem solving and adult learning strategies.
We described antidotes to this absurd "no time" mantra in our book You In Blue and in our work on National programs that we wrote such as Police Training Officer and Police PBL: Blueprint for The 21st Century.
Resident/police collaborative research into night crime - the hallmark of Police Problem-Based Learning methods
Defensive tactics and weapons training necessarily fill a substantial portion of the academy agenda because of the inherent dangers on the street that officers will face from day 1 of their careers.
Defensive tactics (DT) and firearms instructors have hijacked police training schedules and are responsible for much of the fear that exists both within the force and throughout the community. The DT and firearms instructors may have good intentions, but they are doing serious damage to the profession and to police-community relations.
We must stop allowing tactical or firearms instructors to "call the shots" when it comes to crisis training. These instructors are important and they provide a necessary skill, but their mandate must include broad-spectrum problem-solving options, coupled with a focus on working collaboratively with community crisis providers (such as mental health professionals) prior to, during and after violent escalation. Firearms and DT instructors should be trained extensively on the impacts that shootings, violence and vehicle accidents involving police have on the officers as well as the community.
Discipline and adherence to a para-military code of behavior in the academy builds character, cohesion, respect for agency hierarchy and fosters professional pride among the recruits.
This is blue babble!
The concept that we must break down and then build up a new employee makes little sense when recruiters claim they hire only the best candidates. Boot camp may work for soldiers, but police must work within communities, engage intelligently and problem-solve cooperatively.
Yelling and shouting at new employees and telling them they know nothing achieves little except to waste precious training time and stoke the egos of the instructors doing the yelling. Further, we argue it creates an unhealthy role model in the minds of the recruits as to how they should treat people over whom they have power.
Addressing gang and violence problems requires a trusting partnership between officers and residents
Police trainers should discourage recruits from questioning orders, engaging in divergent thinking and challenging up the chain of command. Those practices increase dangers to officers because they may not, at critical times, follow orders when required to do so.
Discipline within the ranks serves as a safety mechanism for agencies and instilling that obligation to authority must begin at the academy.
No one doubts the need for discipline and following orders. These requirements exist in all professions and occupations. Numerous professionals learn to respect authority while engaging with each other to solve problems and employing problem-solving/adult learning methods in their training. Why then do police academies spend so much time on artificial discipline when there are much better techniques to enable self-controlled and socially motivated police officers who think critically?
REPLACING BLUE BABBLE MYTHS WITH TRUTHS
Public safety agencies need to work as part of the communities they serve, not apart from them. They must do more than spout community problem-solving and catchwords in their mission statements and public speeches. Agencies must adopt those methods as their primary style of policing. For decades this has been the central goal of the Problem-Oriented Policing movement and the Police Society for Problem-Based Learning.
Those are the movements that police leaders, political representatives and particularly police trainers need to support.
On many police vehicles it reads "to serve and protect." The logical question arises, "how can the police serve and protect the public from a distance with officers clad in camo clothing, carrying tactical gear and framing interactions with the public as perilous to the officer's survival?" The incessant high alert, 'fear factor' that has crept into police work – again perpetuated at the academy – has led officers to spend far too little time working directly with residents on local crime and violence concerns.
Partnering together to solve crime and violence. We must transform police training and how police work with the community
We will not achieve different responses from our police agencies so long as police leaders allocate inordinate amounts of resources to security and suppression equipment as well as tactical training and so little time to community engagement initiatives. We propose that diverting funds to problem-solving training in cooperation with the community will not only garner better crime reduction, but it will enhance police and community cooperation, trust and positive engagement.
If city managers and police leaders fail to act, the noise from the activist groups calling to Defund the Police will grow louder and soon begin to resonate with more and more reasonable, pro-police members of the community. The time for the combat cop has ended. We should reinvent the age when officers and the community work together to make neighborhoods safe for both the police and the public.
SMART CITIES & COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE - SINGAPORE'S STORY
Never did the reality of rapidly changing and technologically advanced cities become more apparent than during my recent visit to Singapore. Coming from a small European town with narrow medieval streets, city squares and few high rises in its city core, arriving in Singapore felt like time travel. Modern architecture, multi-level pathways and an interplay between city design and nature was, in my eyes, a very different and futuristic image of modern cities.
SINGAPORE – A SMART CITY?
This city of 5.5 million inhabitants was designated a 2015 UNESCO Creative City of Design. It puts great emphasis on its innovation and aesthetic design, and is one of the leading smart cities in the world. Singapore is also one of the safest Asian cities that boasts the highest quality of life in the region.
The Singapore Design Masterplan Committee developed a 2025 design masterplan envisioning a technologically advanced and environmentally sustainable innovative city with opportunities for enjoying all the ample activities that the city has to offer.
However, despite referring to people-centered design, much of Singapore's infrastructure culminated from top-down planning. The 2025 plan describes how they "actively engaged industry and public sector stakeholders through interviews and focus group discussions", but ultimately it fails to consider a deeper level of community involvement and how citizens will develop a stronger sense of community, pride, and neighborliness from design innovations.
As we know in SafeGrowth, in many cities this top-down process often results in citizens becoming disconnected from the plans and decisions made by city agencies. That, in turn, affects ownership and sustainability over the long term as we attempt to enhance social cohesion in neighborhoods.
Smart City strategist Boyd Cohen emphasizes this people-centered point in a recent article when he claims: "Cities must move from treating citizens as recipients of services, or even customers, to participants in the co-creation of improved quality of life."
COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
This people-centered message is well established in neighborhood-based planning. In our SafeGrowth book, my chapter describes neighborhood engagement as an essential part of SafeGrowth planning. The message of the chapter is fundamental; citizens need to become co-creators of their cities.
Fortunately, this is the latest trend in Smart Cities – a shift from a technological and corporate/government planning system toward citizen-driven planning where citizens become co-creators of decisions, solutions and design.
Unfortunately, despite institutional collaboration, Singapore still appears to be driven top-down by the city government and it lacks a coherent citizen component. By comparison, cities such as Vienna, Austria, and Medellin, Columbia are examples showing how equity and social inclusion can play a part in future smart cities.
At the core of citizen-driven smart cities are empowered, smart citizens who collaborate in the development of the city. It is an approach called collective intelligence, and it arises from two ingredients: technology that supports the social and everyday activities of average people; and planning that involves citizens establishing the activities they want in the city they call home.
FROM DESERT TO OASIS - FOOD ACCESS
Finding space for healthy food gardens on rooftops
In the previous blog I wrote about the issue of food access and underlying problems that stem from inequality. We have learned in our SafeGrowth work that there is a connection between inequality, food access and the conditions that create crime. In this blog I present three pillars that can transform food deserts into food oases and concurrently tackle socio-economic disadvantage and crime.
PHYSICAL COMPONENT
Physical accessibility is the first pillar. Local infrastructure and zoning should support access to affordable fresh food within half a mile of residential areas. Many disadvantaged neighborhoods are faced with urban obstacles rooted in socio-economic inequality and high levels of crime that fail to achieve this objective.
Importantly, new supermarkets will not in themselves shift deeply ingrained eating habits without providing nutritional education.
EDUCATION COMPONENT
In addition to physical access, another challenge is insufficient knowledge about nutrition and the effects of eating habits on health.
Community education about healthy food and gardening should include resident involvement
Education about health-promoting eating patterns should complement physical food accessibility. The Design for America Healthy Food (Access) Project developed an innovative approach that provides helpful graphic food guidelines for shoppers.
FINANCIAL COMPONENT
The third pillar focuses on financial aspects. Encouraging providers of fresh and affordable foods to partner with locally owned stores, thereby investing in the local economy, is preferable to relying on large supermarket chains. One strategy to achieve this is Rossi and Brunori's proposals for public and private stakeholder partnerships.
Another report looks at New York public housing and suggests the housing authority should contribute towards food access and economic security by encouraging commercial development on the housing properties. This could be coupled with employing residents to drive both local economy and local governance. Echoing Jane Jacobs, mixed uses promote safety by increasing occupancy and human interaction.
Community gardens are not viable in winter
LOCAL FOOD GOVERNANCE
Food access from a local perspective is gaining traction in food justice circles. Knowing that available resources and education strongly influence food purchasing habits, it is unquestionable that food deserts are not a simple solution solved with new supermarkets.
Food accessibility and food education at a scale that responds to local demands is one major step towards food oases and away from barren food deserts. In SafeGrowth we suggest such changes should be driven With and By local residents for a lasting change towards 21st Century neighborhoods.
PHILADELPHIA POP-UPS - PLACEMAKING FOR ABANDONED LOTS
Plans for a POP-up market in Philadelphia - diagram by Brad Vassallo
GUEST BLOG: Brad Vassallo is a SafeGrowth Advocate having taught POP-up placemaking and community development as part of a SafeGrowth team. He has worked in community development in Philadelphia for the past few years and offers here a case study from that city.
Philadelphia is a city of 40,000 vacant lots. Like many post-industrial cities, it fell victim to a mass exodus of middle-class residents in the mid-20th century. Unfortunately, the 40-plus-year drought in tax revenues has taken its toll, with neighborhoods in North and West Philadelphia ailing from high crime rates and rampant vacancy. These conditions have had a torturous effect on neighborhood quality of life.
As a former student at Temple University in community development, I witnessed first-hand the effects of this multi-generational disinvestment. Asociacion Puertorriquenos en Marcha (APM) is a neighborhood nonprofit serving residents of all color and creed, with a mission of helping families. This is no easy task in a neighborhood commonly referred to as "the Badlands" due to its high frequency of violent crime.
TACKLING THE BADLANDS
As part of my degree, I found myself working with APM during the beginning of a new creative placemaking grant. The goal of the Pop Up Market Place (PUMP), was to reactivate a vacant lot at the corner of 6th Street and Susquehanna Avenue. The 11,000-square-foot lot was slated to become a youth housing facility with ground-floor retail, but the development cycle often takes five or more years. Our task was to reimagine the space as a gateway for a downtrodden stretch of Germantown Avenue. The project involved several layers:
Using 3-D modeling during design charrettes - photo Brad Vassallo
Engage the local community in a conversation about the future of Germantown Avenue using the PUMP site as a centerpiece. Similar to the SafeGrowth model, we operated on a To-For-With-By model; each level represents a greater level of civic participation, with the pinnacle being those projects that are done with or by the community. We assembled a diverse steering committee and arrived at three focus areas: Crime and Safety, Jobs, and Youth Engagement.
Using feedback from the Steering Committee, we offered regular programming on the site to draw foot traffic and build awareness. Our events included an end-of-school summer block party, neighborhood potluck, and movie nights. Children flocked to the site for water balloon fights and piragua on a hot summer day. Neighborhoods like this have endured a great deal of trauma. By holding a small community event on the project site, we began to strip away some of the negative association people had with that location.
Mapping survey and data collection areas
We led entrepreneurship training to build capacity. In a neighborhood like ours, educational attainment is low, making traditional employment difficult for most residents. Starting a small business is a more attractive option for first-generation immigrant families. By offering free training we were able to tap into our neighborhood's entrepreneurial spirit and offer an alternative income stream.
The final step was to identify a few promising candidates from our training with whom we could launch a business incubator on the site. Brick-and-mortar businesses have significant overhead expenses. By repurposing a few recycled shipping containers for micro-retail, we could lower the barrier to entry for these new business owners and provide a safe haven for residents to shop locally and explore.
Activating spaces at night - photo Brad Vassallo
Despite problems moving this version of the project forward, we learned how to revive vacant land and encourage business activities. We also learned that this unique design style was easy to mobilize, it could move from parcel to parcel, and it provided a beta-test for local businesses as an alternative form of entrepreneurialism.
GLASS HALF FULL - ASSET MAPPING
Community-based asset mapping in Hollygrove, New Orleans - photo by Claire Vancauwemberge
I recently read John McKnight's 1995 book The Careless Society: The Community and its Counterfeits. It reminded me of the vital importance in what we term vision-based asset mapping in our SafeGrowth work.
McKnight shows how elevating community capacities, rather than focusing on community deficiencies, can mitigate the many threats to community life that stem from a forest of unfocused and inefficient social services.
THE SOCIAL SERVICE INDUSTRY
The book's core premise of "a glass half full" explains why systems of professionalized social services embedded within our daily lives fail to generate authentic citizen communities that care. As we teach in SafeGrowth, building cohesion in troubled communities is difficult when residents don't care, or when they expect other organizations to solve local problems with no local involvement.
Public exercise area for nearby apartments - fitness assets for everyone
The issue McKnight sees with communities surrendering their power to the social service system is the assumption that communities are not able to identify their problems and solve them on their own, or with the assistance of others.
Thus starts the dependency-creating cycle that external service providers propagate. Then, as service professionals present themselves as experts with a suite of solutions to proposed problems, they often justify their own raison d'être while contributing little to positive change in the communities that have become dependent on them.
Asset mapping can reveal empty lots ideal for building community gardens
All this generates negative side effects and leads to a disabled citizenry and weakened community ties resulting in a loss in local capacity to self-organize. In effect, says McKnight, we become surrounded by community services but isolated from the community.
This does not mean that social services and others offer no value. However, communities need to themselves identify these services as useful and thus become active, rather than passive, actors in the life of their community.
VISION-BASED ASSET MAPPING
McKnight offers asset mapping as a tool for empowering communities and building capacity.
In our SafeGrowth work we help residents tap into the neighborhood resources to realize whatever vision they create to resolve problems within their neighborhood. We use this neighborhood social analysis as an important part of visioning and problem identification.
Some SafeGrowth teams employ GPS mapping software
However, unlike McKnight's broad scan, we tailor our approach into vision-based asset mapping - tailoring assets toward a specific vision for that problem. This step is repeated for different areas gradually building a repertoire of assets for the entire neighborhood. Neighbors themselves learn not only much more about local gifts for capacity-building right at their fingertips, but they learn how to use them for problem-solving.
The vision-based asset mapping approach empowers residents to become active in solving neighborhood problems. At the same time, they choose what social services to summon and reduce their dependency on external service providers.
POP-UP PLACEMAKING - ACTIVATING SPACES WITH LOCALS
SafeGrowth's Brad Vassallo demonstrating how to create pop-up placemaking near Penn Station, New York
We are frequently asked in our seminars how to activate unsafe places with fun, lively and safe activities. In CPTED the generic term used for this is called 'activity generation', but that term hardly describes it nor what works in one place over another. For years our SafeGrowth programs have turned to urban placemaking for answers.
Placemaking began, some claim, with the 1970s research of William H. Whyte, especially his book The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.
It was Whyte who inspired the development of New York's PPS - the Project for Public Spaces - still an active placemaking group today. A few years ago we worked alongside PPS in New Jersey and found placemaking directly relevant to CPTED, particularly 2nd Generation CPTED.
More recently our friends at Portland's City Repair movement have been an inspiration. Members of City Repair attended our first SafeGrowth Summit two years ago and we often feature their guerrilla architecture on this blog.
NEW YORK POP-UP
This week we conducted training for community leaders in New York. SafeGrowth Advocate Brad Vassallo joined our training team and ran a terrific session during our training called POP-up placemaking, which is the process of directly engaging local residents and passers-by at a public spot where place activation may help.
Once one team started unpacking supplies, dozens of passers-by began joining with their POP-up theme, What are you thankful for?
The public quickly contributed comments both candid and profound
POP-up placemaking has the advantage of requiring few funds and simple planning. Because it will not last long, it may have only short-term impact. However, a regular program of POP-ups may well provide a planner or community practitioner a great tactic to engage locals in a fun and easy way to start the long process of building relationships and reducing fear.
On the streets outside Penn Station in New York, our 4 teams spoke to dozens of New Yorkers, enticed them to use simple materials (blue interlocking rubber tiles, tape, chalk, colored string), and construct some simple and fun placemaking activities. Within minutes people stopped to participate, write, dance, talk, laugh, and co-create spaces around a bus stop, a subway stairway entrance, and along a public wall.
It took less than 30 minutes to complete the entire activity using about $100 of material. Obviously, space activation need not be complicated, expensive, or permanent. In a class exercise, this was simple enough. In a real-life community project, this can launch a transformation.
One team discovered the simple act of taking out the material and starting to build was enough to attract passers-by to stop and begin chatting
PROVIDENCE - BREATHING LIFE INTO A BUS STOP
Trinity Square neighborhood, Providence, R.I. - photo Google Earth
Providence, Rhode Island, an hour drive from Boston, is among the oldest cities in the U.S. and one of the first to industrialize. Today it confronts post-industrial poverty and associated crime. Yet it retains a lively cultural life and, with considerable urban reinvestment and 5 colleges and universities, it is working to breathe new life into ethnically diverse neighborhoods.
Residents from Providence participated in the recent Chicago SafeGrowth training to learn concepts from 1st and 2nd Generation CPTED and apply them to one of their small-scale trouble spots. They chose Trinity Square, an area that suffered 15 violence crimes, 10 property-related crimes, and over 200 police calls for service in the 6 months leading up to the class.
Google Streetview of the Trinity Square bus stop prior to the SafeGrowth project
TRINITY SQUARE
As the Providence SafeGrowth team describe in their report "most of the activity on that site is negative in nature and works against the progress of positive growth with high levels of drug activity, panhandling, homelessness, and abandoned property."
Providence SafeGrowth team launches first Game Off at the cleaned bus stop
The team knew their first step was to work with local stakeholders such as police and break down fear of crime and activate spaces with a series of organized activities. They started getting locals involved in positive social events. They chose a Trinity Square bus stop to install some board games and then launch a promotional program for regularly scheduled events.
Providence police are partners on the SafeGrowth team
Last week, on the inauspicious date of 9/11, the team ran their first weekly Game Off event, with residents from around the area. It was a smashing success as shown in the photos.
They plan to run this regularly. They are committed to establishing a more positive environment at this location and re-establishing the Trinity Square area as a neighborhood asset.
Congratulations to the Providence SafeGrowth team.
Friendly competition in Trinity Square's first Game Off event
NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH? PERHAPS NOT!
When you ask people to provide an example of crime prevention, the first program they mention is Neighbourhood Watch (or Block Watch). This is not surprising considering that for 45 years it has been implemented extensively. Police departments offer toolkits for residents and many neighbourhoods sport signs that say "Block Watch Community – All suspicious behaviours will be reported to the police."
Neighbourhood Watch originated in Seattle in 1972 when the Law and Justice Planning Office conducted a survey and found that residents were most concerned about burglary. They created a program to:
Train residents in target hardening techniques
Encourage willing residents to share information about their schedules
Create a network of residents to watch after each other's houses, and
Report suspicious behaviour to each other and the local police.
The program produced massive declines in burglary rates (48-61%). Thus, Neighbourhood Watch was deemed an exemplary project and, backed by the National Crime Prevention Council and most police departments, it took off across North America.
The ubiquitous Neighbourhood Watch sign. Are residents doing anything?
Some positive results continue today. For example, British research shows it cuts burglary in UK neighbourhoods by 16% to 26%.
However, Neighbourhood Watch has been subject to considerable criticism. Research demonstrated that expansions of the program in different cities produce positive results only in middle-class neighbourhoods that already had strong social cohesion. Other studies found that it tended to have negative consequences, including increasing fear of crime.
So what happened to this exemplary project?
Current versions of Neighbourhood Watch have missed the mark in addressing crime problems and mobilizing residents to address them. Some accounts claim they do not encourage neighbours to organize around crime issues that they care about.
Instead, today's programs are a shadow of what they once were; they play lip service to a once well-designed program by posting signs and handing out flyers. In most case, residents call their local police service to install signs and give residents information on how to secure their homes or notice suspicious behaviour. Unfortunately, they miss the point regarding what contributed to the success of the original program – people!
THE MISSING INGREDIENT
This is in direct opposition to the action research methodology that underpins SafeGrowth - to address relevant crime issues with local residents, not to or for them. When people and context are removed from the equation, all we are left with is a feel-good program.
We don't need signs, flyers and more door locks. We need engaged neighbourhoods where police and residents work together on crime issues that matter most and then co-create lasting solutions. That is how we move forward.
A BALTIMORE TRAILBLAZER (PART 2)
Baltimore tot lot in need of community/city attention
by Kallan Lyons
Kallan is a journalist who has blogged for Journalists for Human Rights and has contributed to the Kingston Whig-Standard newspaper. In 2013 she spent 6 months as media trainer in Ghana at the African College of Communications. She wrote this guest blog after attending the last part of the Baltimore SafeGrowth course.
"I had an overall instinctual sense that I was not safe." - Community member who uses the Tot Lot, Pigtown, Baltimore
When the SafeGrowth Tot Lot team in Baltimore met Edith Nelson, they knew they had found an ally.
Tasked with transforming the park in Pigtown into a safe space for families, they consulted with Ms. Nelson. As reported in the last blog, A Baltimore trailblazer - Part 1, Ms. Edith has played an integral part in the process.
Now with her support, the team plans to clean up the lot and capitalize on community partnerships in an effort to decrease criminal behavior in the area. The team brought new energy to the project with representatives from the community, the Mayor's Office, and the police.
STEPS FOR CHANGE
Here are just a couple of the recommendations put forward by the Safegrowth team members who are determined to build on the foundation laid by Ms. Nelson.
Perfect location for movie-night screen or possibly community murals
Throughout the Baltimore SafeGrowth training, the team addressed potential factors inhibiting locals from using the space. Surrounding the park are several abandoned homes and a liquor store; in addition, the tot lot is poorly lit in the evenings. Instead of people gathering in the park for block parties and barbecues, frequent activities include drug use and drinking.
While Ms. Nelson often peruses the park for trash, picking up empty bottles and other items left behind, the job is becoming too big for just one person.
That's where the SafeGrowth team stepped in. The team's vision includes volunteer clean-up crews and regular outdoor programs led by community groups. They plan to contact owners of abandoned homes to negotiate improvements. Other strategies included:
building social connections by contacting the nearby school and church to involve them in activities such as mural painting
increased police attention to the tot lot
community events such as movies-in-the-park to build social cohesion
better signage, installing LED lighting, reinstalling benches and adding play equipment.
Prior installation of tot lot equipment needs regular community support and city maintenance
The goal is to restore the Tot Lot to its original use: a welcoming, family-oriented environment where parents and their children feel safe. Now that the wheels are in motion, and with Ms. Nelson on their side, a possibility is being turned into a promise.
The Tot Lot transformation started with one woman, and thanks to the SafeGrowth team, it will resume with the community.
School sexual abuse - Who guards the guardians?
Removing external threats does not remove internal threats
In The Republic, Plato asserted it is absurd "a guardian should need a guardian". Five Centuries later the Roman poet Juvenal rejected this and claimed guardians do not always behave ethically and should not be trusted. Incidents of child sexual abuse by school personnel, estimated in some studies between 3.7% to 4.1% (almost 1 in 20), suggest that Juvenal may be right.
While increased focus has been placed on external threats such as school shootings, children remain largely defenseless from internal threats of sexual abuse by staff.
I was recently tasked with investigating whether child-safe schools can be designed to prevent child abuse by school staff. This led me to dig deep into the literature, while remaining skeptical the solution to this social problem was physical modification.
Too often internal threats are hidden and remain a secret
The first step required understanding the contextual factors leading to abuse. Some of the findings revealed:
Incidents occur in settings that provide isolation, such as during one-on-one interactions often in boarding houses, camps, cars, during after-school and extracurricular activities, or at the perpetrator's home
Abuse is characterised by gradual desensitisation where "grooming" behaviours commence with increased attention until escalating to obscene gestures and inappropriate behaviours.
Exacerbating the problem is inadequate legislation, unsatisfactory institutional policies and procedures, inadequate awareness, institutional blindness, and inability to centre strategies on child welfare. All that leaves children vulnerable to abuse by those who should be protecting them.
The second step was research into preventive strategies, revealing the problem needs a holistic multi-level approach. These include:
Child safety policies and training for everyone (including children, parents, and teachers) that clarify acceptable behaviours
An institutional culture with zero tolerance policy for all forms of child abuse
Management practices that minimise opportunities for inappropriate encounters
Community strategies (media campaigns, bystander interventions)
Institutional transparency.
Schools must offer safe environments for study and play
Design Out Crime strategies proved ineffective for addressing the intricate problem of institutional child sexual abuse. Instead, responses should embed child safety at individual, organizational and systemic levels while also giving children a voice in the matters affecting them.
As Juvenal might suggest, trusting guardians is not simple and responsibility for preventing child abuse falls to wider society at all levels including neighborhoods, parents, and schools.
"What attracts people most is other people"
Just as I was writing about homelessness and walkable public spaces I received a Vimeo from SafeGrowth friend Sue Ramsay in New Zealand. It is a 4 minute video uncovering simple urban design and social programming features that make a public space fantastic.
It is all based on William H. Whyte's 1980 book The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, and to a lesser extent his follow-up book, City: Rediscovering The Center.
Whyte was born 100 years ago and he became mentor to Jane Jacobs and inspiration for the New York place-making group Project for Public Spaces.
Screenshot from William Whyte: In His Own Words by Clarence Eckerson Jr., Streetfilms
For CPTED practitioners, William H. Whyte is among the bright lights in the history of urban design. He invented the idea of urban carrying capacity - later called tipping points - used throughout 2nd Generation CPTED. Like any student of urban affairs and planning he loved cities. He envisioned the return of the Agora to the modern city and, best of all, showed us how to get there.
His ideas for reclaiming civilized, walkable, and fun urban places are simple, obvious and oddly ignored in too many cities. Here are a few that show up in the video:
the wonderful invention that is the movable chair
musicians and street arts make a place fun
fountains cannot induce sitting unless there are decent places to sit
protect access to the sun
water should be accessible, touchable, and slapable
street personalities make a public place more amicable.
Thanks to Sue for reminding us about one of our pioneers.
Water in public spaces should be touchable and slapable - Screenshot from William Whyte: In His Own Words
Placemaking - Kiwi-style
The placemaking tactic called Intersection Repair made a recent appearance in the southern hemisphere.
A few years ago SafeGrowth Advocate Sue Ramsay ran some SafeGrowth training in her New Zealand city of Christchurch in two different neighborhoods. Thanks to the Riccarton West neighborhood SafeGrowth team, they have created a first for New Zealand.
Christchurch is the city rebuilding itself after suffering such a devastating earthquake a few years ago. Sue and other former leaders in that city saw neighborhood revitalization as a great way to move forward as the bulldozers and builders reconstructed.
The West Riccarton team has been working on activating their neighborhood and they recently completed their first intersection repair project. The time lapse video tells the story.
Congratulations to all involved! Another step forward.
Yarn bombing as placemaking - Adventure in Adelaide
Mall's Balls - popular meeting place in Adelaide's Rundle Mall
GUEST BLOG – Mateja Mihinjac is a criminologist at Griffith University, Australia completing her doctoral research on CPTED implementation. She is a member of the International CPTED Association. She recently attended the Asia-Pacific ICA CPTED Forum and kindly submitted this blog.
In mid-October, the ICA hosted a 2014 regional Asia-Pacific CPTED forum themed Better CPTED - Multidisciplinary Design for Safer Places.
The participants came from many different backgrounds thus bringing to the table a rainbow of strategies. Despite the differences we all agreed better and safer places emerge from the special features that make places more attractive and the people who use those places. I found great examples on the streets of Adelaide.
The nicely maintained Victoria Square offers numerous opportunities for social activities, meeting spots and sheltered seating areas. Walking down the pedestrian Rundle Mall I found The Mall's Balls - a common meeting point for people in the mall.
Dame Roma Mitchell statue
Looking for examples of people being users and co-creators of such special places I discovered some yarn bombing - dressed-up Rundle Mall Pigs and a statue of Dame Roma Mitchell on the North Terrace. They instantly attracted my attention and reminded me of the yarn bombed road barrier from Melbourne in a blog from a few months ago.
Turns out that the pigs and the statue were not isolated cases and that yarn bombing is popular throughout Adelaide, especially since 2012 when even the statue of Queen Victoria received a makeover. Yarn bombing is now part of Adelaide's community events and it all started from local people aiming to create better places for and by themselves.
Rundle Mall yarn bombed pigs
Yarn bombing and its "softer" version known as yarn storming (in the UK) manifests community pride and provides a personal touch in public places. It is widely considered a feminine form of graffiti or artistic vandalism.
Creative approaches such as knitting are one channel for the public to express and partake in public life. What I find neat about this approach is that it empowers those who traditionally wouldn't participate in public activism and allows them to have a say in their own communities.
Placemaking surely comes in many forms.
Sheltered seating in Victoria Square
There are no spectators
"Innovations involve imaginative leaps capable of carrying us beyond existing practice." - David Morley (1980)
Today I have been reflecting on an old friend.
So many prevention, policing and planning programs today seem like throwaway ideas in a sea of mediocrity. Few last long and even fewer work. Yet everyone has a shtick. Sadly most are just new gizmos and old ideas rehashed. As they say in Canada they are all stick and no puck.
At a time when so many neighborhoods face the social turbulence that is crime and violence, where is the original thinking? Where is the creativity and wisdom?
Long ago, when I began my graduate studies in planning, human ecology and environmental criminology, I met someone who taught and lived that kind of creativity. His wisdom changed my life. He is the friend I mentioned above and last week he died after a long bout with cancer.
PROFESSOR DAVID MORLEY
Professor David Morley was my supervisor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto. He was the smartest scholar I have known (I have known some greats).
Never shy of conceptual rigor, David was one of those who taught that an ounce of action is worth a ton of theories. His field was action research and action learning which included advanced methods of group collaboration and community participation, the very lifeblood of creativity. Thanks to David those methods are now embedded in SafeGrowth planning theory.
He wrote profusely but for me his two best works were Making Cities Work: The Dynamics of Innovation (1980) and Planning in Turbulence (1986).
ACTIVATING COMMUNITIES
Both books are full of ideas on how to activate community groups and how to engage residents to change their own neighborhoods. There are no techno-fixes here - no CCTV, no anti-homeless spikes, and no burglary foggers. There is just hard work in community development. Today, thirty years after David co-wrote those books, we need those methods, and David's wisdom, more than ever.
At a time when I had just decided to leave a career as a street cop, and I might have gone in many different directions to places of uncertain destination, David Morley gently and passionately taught me to think big, think important and, while riding the turbulent currents that carry us in life, never forget there are no spectators. Goodbye David and thank you for your gifts, guidance, and friendship.
"...perhaps only under the tension of threatening and uncertain environments are collective innovations likely." - David Morley, (1986)
They just won't get involved - Part 2
In Philadelphia they show free movie nights to activate neighborhood handball courts - photo Handball Court team report, 2010 SafeGrowth Training
Judging by recent e-traffic, my last blog struck a chord! Especially the contention that community engagement in policing has been a dreary failure. I conclude that, except in problem-oriented policing or when mentored by non-profits (see below), it seems a lost cause.
Truth is, aside from trite historical footnotes ("the police are the public, the public are the police") most police-community engagement today is little more than political optics. Of course, as in all polemics, that isn't true everywhere.
I was impressed to discover the Dallas Police Community Engagement Unit. Then I read it is three policing teams who do evidence-based analysis, work with apartment owners to deal with crooks, and attend community meetings where they "gather information first-hand that can be relayed to other teams in the department."
MORE THAN REPORTING CRIME
There's nothing wrong with asking the community for information on criminals. That's good police work. But let's not pretend it is community engagement.
Ultimately I don't think any of this explains our engagement flop, at least not the version where residents take an active role planning and working towards their own public safety. Perhaps police are not the best agency to do that anyway.
Governments hardly do any better. National Crime Prevention Councils rely on national "night outs", neighborhood watch schemes, or education about existing crime prevention programs. In other words walk around at night, watch out for crooks and call the cops.
I know I'm simplifying and yet a critical thinker must ask, Who is really "engaged" when that engagement amounts to little more than walking around, calling the cops, or going to meetings?
CPTED history offers some hope. Consider Oscar Newman's dictum in Creating Defensible Space; Always include grass roots participation in prevention planning!
We use a similar approach in SafeGrowth though our message is conveyed in a different way. For example, one lighthouse shining brightly on community-policing partnerships is the LISC - CSI SafeGrowth programs.
Residents and police conducting night time safety audits in Milwaukee - photo Sam Carlsen
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
When the message is engagement we need a messenger who is appropriately staffed, resourced and most of all, trained in engagement tactics. The last time I checked the Engagement Toolkit I counted over 60 tactics. That messenger must master them all.
Who is that messenger? Probably a non-profit like LISC or AARP, a philanthropic organization, a municipal planning department (as in Saskatoon), and an active community association. It will require municipal executives, particularly police chiefs and city managers, who know how to advocate for and implement such a model. They must be properly trained how to do that.
Every time I've seen successful engagement in places like San Diego, Milwaukee, Saskatoon, and Philadelphia I get the feeling that is the shape of the future. At least I hope it is.
They just won't get involved...
Authentic engagement rarely emerges from community meetings
An email showed up this week from a crime prevention colleague in a far-away city.
"Not sure if it's a sign of the times or just the fast pace, long work hours, and long bus commutes…but it's a bit of an uphill struggle to get some communities to take ownership of their neighborhood issues."
It's a theme I've heard over and over - getting residents, shop-owners and locals out of their homes, away from TV to "do" crime prevention. Setting aside their boredom (or their fears) and working together in common cause.
That theme hovers raptor-like over work that depends on building community. Sometimes called capacity building, or in the latest sociological parlance collective efficacy, this is the idea ofcommunity engagement.
Engagement is the road kill of community crime prevention, in one moment obvious and in another impossible.
Academics study it, policy wonks insist on it and social workers claim it brings meaning to neighborhood life. Yet none of them tell us exactly how to do it, how to get people outside and "engaged".
In criminology the grandest experiment in community engagement was the juvenile delinquency work in the famous Chicago Area Project back in the 1930s and 1940s (still going on). Even today strains of that work echo in studies about cutting youth violence with community engagement.
COMMUNITY MEETINGS?
Police too did their bit during the community policing era with community engagement strategies, though they were usually limited to those monstrosities where cops sat up front in some hall to "engage" the community (sort of) in community meetings.
There were experiments with neighborhood substations, now long gone (closed in the name of funding cuts as expenditures turned instead to fancy computer programs, night-vision goggles and new military equipment). In most cities all that remains is the police/community meeting room (usually adjacent to the front foyer at HQ).
And still none of that tells us anything about the simplest question: How do we get neighborhood dwellers engaged and into the public realm – their street, parks, community halls – where their lives intersect in a real way?
FOOD AND FUN
Then I remembered this lovely, formally adorned, Muslim mother at a SafeGrowth training a few years ago. She came up to me and said quietly, "you know, in the Muslim community engagement in daily life starts with great meals and tasty food. Celebration starts in the stomach." Actually, I thought, it does for everyone! Potlucks, barbeques, corn and hotdog roasts, lemonade stands!
Interesting, isn't it! It is the fun and joyful things of community life like food, music, and play that draw people out. It's those times when they meet and share in each others lives in a gradual and 'smell-the-roses' kind of way. Less community organizer and more community jester.
Kinetic sculpture race down the street - bath tub boats on steroids
Engaging Monterrey - stone by stone
Painted stones marking trail in Monterrey, Mexico
What is impressive about a gravel trail with painted stones?
I've been reading reports from SafeGrowth teams in Connecticut. One struggle I hear is how to engage community members.
Last week, I was in Monterrey, Mexico, site of the 2011 narcoterrorist attack on a downtown casino where over 50 people were murdered. Engagement should be more difficult here than anywhere. I was taken to a poor community on the outskirts of the city near the construction site of a master-planned community.
It was unlikely residents in this poor community could afford to live in the new development. My guides, a dynamic Monterrey CPTED team, showed me the poor community and a rocky ravine beneath a highway overpass with an elementary school on the other side. School kids had to walk across this unsafe stretch to go to school. A gravel trail had been built connecting the community with the school.
Sometimes the simplest ideas can trigger community engagement - a gravel trail
Residents, school kids, the developer, and volunteer construction crews had come together to build the trail. The Monterrey CPTED team ran a painting day when school kids painted stones. They then used the stones to mark the trail edges.
The visible part of this project was simple - a gravel trail, painted stones, and construction volunteers. It was the invisible part that caught my attention – engagement!
The kids and their parents enthusiastically showed me their trail and the stones, from one end to the other. This was clearly a source of pride. Discussion focused on expanding the trail and adding play areas.
In other words, residents with few resources had built their own solution to a neighborhood problem in a region of Mexico not far from one of the most violent narco-gang wars in history. By partnering with others they were making their community a better place, stone by stone. Those actions are community-engagement seeds starting to grow.
Not just a gravel trail and painted stones. Much more.
Scenic mountains surround Monterrey's 4 million residents
Cutting crime with harmonicas
Andy Mackie played harmonica at a local restaurant/theatre during open-mike Monday nights, just down the street. A painting of him hangs on the wall at the back of the bar.
Andy believed music was a gift so he gave free lessons and harmonicas to school-kids. He paid for those harmonicas with money for his medication. He paid with his life and he wouldn't have it any other way.
Community capacity-building is one of those phrases that spreads over everything like goo. Different practitioners use the term to mean different things. Thus, it means everything and nothing. What is "community capacity?"
The best way to get at capacity is through asset mapping. Asset mapping is based on the work of John McKnight and John Kretzman. Asset maps substitute the idea of deficiencies and needs for community assets - turning a negative into a positive. Assets include physical features and groups.
They also include those things that might seem invisible like the talents, skills and experience of the elderly. Andy Mackie was a talent and an asset. He was definitely not invisible.
If you want to know what positive community-building looks like, watch the video.
A GIFT FOR THE HOLIDAYS
Residents installed their own street lights
Back in New Orleans this week talking at a crime summit hosted by Louisiana AARP. The topic is how SafeGrowth and the Hollygrove success story might work throughout the city.
The highlight was meeting old friends from Hollygrove and watching them tell their story to groups from throughout the city. A 78% decline in crime rates this year is quite a story, especially when crime elsewhere in the city is plateauing.
Recently there has been an increase in New Orleans homicides. Hollygrove's homicides have declined from 20 to 4.
How, they were asked, did they turn things around?
Difficult to spell out in clear steps. Certainly plenty of early steps were underway soon after Hurricane Katrina. A garden center was reinvigorated by volunteers (see photo). The city began a program of condemning and demolishing blighted properties (over 35% of all homes were condemned when we did our first SafeGrowth session 3 years ago. Today that's down to just under 20%).
Then AARP Louisiana came to the table with their Livability Academy and training. Change sped up considerably.
Tulane University architecture students recently helped design and build this pavilion at the Hollygrove Growers Market and Farm - Photo by inspiredeconomist.com
For me this neighborhood continues to improve due to the soul and gumption of some local residents. They started their own non-profit organization and now claim ownership for making changes themselves.
Here's a few things the residents did:
1.Installed their own street lighting when they could not get the city to do it
2.Could not get official street signs so used politicians signs from the last election to make their own (see…politicians can help troubled neighborhoods!)
3.Quadrupled attendance at Night Out Against Crime walks
4.Cleaned and swept their own streets.
5.Absent landlords refused to move lawns, local residents did it
6.Partnered with police and the city to shut down a drug house
7.Created a seniors walking group - the Soul Steppers - to take back their streets. Soul Stepper groups are now throughout New Orleans
8.Got a problem bar to get rid of drug dealers
9.Bus department would not repair a bus shelter so they built their own with recycled materials
That's how you start to turn a place around.
To my friends in Hollygrove, congratulations! It's a great way to start the new year.
A new children's area in a Hollygrove park
Senior's walking toward - and choosing - their own future
SAFEGROWTH DEFINED: Crime prevention and community building is best achieved within the neighborhood by harnessing the creative energy of neighborhood change agents and functional groups.
I'm on a roll with good news stories lately. Here's another one demonstrating the above.
Hurricane Katrina hammered it. Fifteen to 20 murders annually vexed it. Even homegrown rapper L'il Wayne once sang "Hollygrove ain't no muthaf**kin melrose".
No longer.
Hollygrove in New Orleans is born again. Not in the religious sense…though, maybe. SafeGrowth training through Louisiana AARP is part of this story (eg: read The Hollygrove Story and Bus Shelter Madness).
New Orleans' Hollygrove - success story
Only four murders this year. What's down? Crime, by 78%. What's up? Community events, garden centers, and Night Out Against Crime. AARP-sponsored strategic planning sessions with residents charted new urban designs for elder-friendly places. The Hollygrove Walking Club now walks for health and peace.
Two weeks ago Hollygrove won a national MetLife Foundation award from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. Watch this new videoon their success story.
Here's another video, this one about their garden program.
The rappers are right. The hood's where it's at!
Stumble Safely! Crime maps to the rescue?
I'm always intrigued by a trip to Washington, D.C. Inside the beltway it has remarkable sights, a successful subway system, sprawling parks, and terrific dining.
Outside the beltway, it's another city. There are wealthy and intriguing neighborhoods - mostly low crime and safe - and blighted and poor neighborhoods to the east - mostly high crime and unsafe.
Once known as Murder City USA, today Washington's crime declines echo the Great American Crime Decline in every other city since 1990s.
Still, high crime and fear remain.
In recent years police have enacted "crime emergencies" allowing the cops to double their manpower at peak times, gang intervention programs and police checkpoints. Though murders are at an all-time low, they are still 5 times the national average.
It is 2 years since the Supreme Court lifted DC's handgun ban. Yet the fear of crime persists. ABC news claims it's the affluent neighborhoods (where crime was already lowest) where gun purchases have spiked - a matter of fear over reality. It's in the poor neighborhoods (where most crime happens) where gun purchases have been dropping!
And now a cool new website - Stumble Safely - is under development in DC. Say's it's promo:
"Stumble Safely helps you find the best bars and a safe path to stumble home on. You can see some of our favorite spots on these maps …It doesn't matter when or where you start drinking for Stumble Safely to help you."
Websites to prevent crime?
In other words, in spite of the crime declines, police tactics, and gun purchases, perhaps in the end it's everyday community folks coming up with innovative new ideas (like setting up their own websites) that can best improve safety.
Jane Jacobs, it seems, was right.
Seen and Heard: Kids in the City
A scene from Seen and Heard
Last spring I mentioned the film Radiant City, a documentary about the plight of kids in the suburbs.
I just watched another about kids in other parts of the city. The film is by Demos a UK-based think tank on social and political affairs. Their YouTube Seen and Heard says it all. Click HERE to view it.
I rarely see young people at conferences, public meetings, or workshops that I attend. When I ask why I'm met with silence. When I ask for their inclusion in a fun and engaging way, I'm usually met by the question: But this isn't for kids!
Really? Then why does so much of our planning, policing, and crime prevention work circle around them?
Demos claims over 70% of today's adults played outside on the streets as kids. Only 21% of today's kids do. True, they may be too obsessed with texting, cells, and other virtual places. Then again, a galaxy of creative talent builds interesting and fun adventures in that virtual space. By contrast, only a microscopic dot of creative talent goes into building equally interesting and fun places for kids in our public realm.
Says Demos: Public space is failing our younger generation. "Those responsible for making playful places find it difficult to work together and struggle to engage with children properly".
A month or so ago myself and a half dozen local residents watched a TED.com show at a nearby community high school with 20 teens and their teachers. We listened to experts talk on the environment, education, and other topics after which we took turns sharing thoughts and ideas. They had great ideas, great frustrations, and great energy.
In short, there was no lack of creative talent. All that makes me ask this: If our public space is failing our young people, shouldn't we be asking them how to fix it?


Maximo is a 3D platformer adventure series loosely based on the Ghosts 'n Goblins series. Being a PS2 release in 2001, it was a new incarnation of the beloved series. The protagonist is not Sir Arthur, but Maximo, a young king trying to rescue his queen from the evil king Achille. There's other bits to the story, but suffice to say you have to rescue your girl.
The decision to bring the franchise into 3D was inevitable. Ever since the late 90's, 2D was reminiscent of inferior gaming platforms. There was no going back to 2D gaming, so Capcom forged ahead into the modern age. Although it was initially conceived for the N64, it ended up being a PS2 exclusive. I think that the game benefitted from being delayed as the power of the PS2 produces some of the best visuals on the console. The character models have a unique style to them, balanced between a cartoon and anime aesthetic. The stage design is well thought out, and truly retains the spirit of the platformer genre.
As far as gameplay, control is tight and necessarily so. The double jump returns and is very necessary. Platforms, crevices, lava, poisonous water, falling ground, and other hazards are all around you, so you need to be mindful of your surroundings. Given its roots, the path to take is still fairly linear, as the environment funnels you in the general direction of progress. There are still areas to explore that are partially or totally obscured, and often they are worth the time to investigate. If you appear to be stuck, there may be hidden switches to trigger, in order to open a path.
Like all 3D platformers, the behavior of the camera can make or break a game's playability; in this case the camera does its best to keep your focus ahead of you, but if it strays due to changes in direction, it can easily be restored to behind you with a tap of the R1 shoulder button. This seems to be one of the major complaints of this game, but as long as you get in the habit of refocusing the camera before major leaps you will be fine.
Following in the lineage of its series, Maximo is known to be difficult, although not nearly as hard as its predecessors. You have an life bar that expands with additional armor. Each armor segment can take a few hits before it pops off, revealing your iconic boxer shorts.
Once disrobed, you can take a few more hits before you die. There are checkpoints throughout the stage, so you don't have to start each stage from the beginning when you die.
This time around, instead of throwing a lance, you are equipped with a sword and shield. Initially, you have two attacks at your disposal: a slash and overhead swing. This seems limited, but it is to force you to learn how to use your attacks in different scencarios. Eventually you pick up new skills as power up drops, and add them to your skill set. Your skill set has a certain number of "locked" skills, that you will not loose when you die. The number of locked skills that you can save increases every time you defeat a boss. There will be lots of skills to pick up, and you can decide at any time by pressing the select button which skills you want locked. Other skills that can be obtained are the ability to throw your shield, different sword strokes, the ability to force hidden chests to the surface, and many others.
The enemies are primarily skeletons, differentiated by outfits. They have varying attacks, weaknesses, patterns, and strength. An attack that works on one may not work on another. Running through the stage and hacking past everything may not work, as you'll likely take lots of damage in the process. A better approach is isolate each enemy when possible, luring them out one by one.
Your sword strength can be powered up as well. There are three levels to power up: the flaming sword, the glowing sword, which I presume to be lightning, and the purple havoc sword, each one more powerful than the last.
Once you pass the first stage, you enter a hub world where you can enter any of the remaining stage one worlds in any order. It is here that you can save your progress, albeit it costs 100 coins per save. This is one aspect of the game that I didn't care for, but coins are plentiful. Once all the stages in the hub world are passed, the bridge to the tower in the center lowers and you can enter to battle the boss of that world. Each one is as different as they come, and in traditional platformer fashion, trial and error is the key to success.
It is a challenging game, but a rewarding one. It is a game that requires patience and grit to get through, but the gameplay is so good that it makes you want to try again. It came out during a time where there were so many games realeased at once, it immediately got buried. It is worth a second look, and can be found for just a few dollars. If you like platformers with old-school aesthetics, give this one a chance.


Thursday, May 5th was a national holiday in Belgium. It also happened to be a very sunny and warm day, and since these two things don't happen so often, we decided it would be a shame to spend the day at home. The day before we asked our colleague where he recommends we should visit. We have already visited few Belgian cities and some of them multiple times. So this time we wanted to go somewhere new and somewhere in Wallonia. He recommended Namur and mentioned the Citadel of Namur as a landmark worth a visit.
When Belgium was organized into three Regions: the Walloon Region, the Flemish Region and the Brussels-Capital region, Namur became the capital of the Walloon Region. The Parliament, the Government and the Administrative Services of Wallonia are all here. Namur is the third largest city in Wallonia, but it doesn't seem big and especially city center is quite small and cozy.
From Brussels, we took a train to Namur which is a pretty comfortable and convenient way to get there. During the weekends and national holidays, the 'weekend ticket' applies so for round-trip ticket anywhere in Belgium you pay just a half of the price.
Going from the train station in Namur you cannot get lost because right away you enter the city center and its shopping streets. As you traverse the city center, you find yourself on a river bank and in front of the Citadel of Namur.
This was a highlight of our trip. This old fortress was transformed into a park at the end of 19th century, and it is open for the public to walk on its grounds freely. Grey stone houses, green trees and lawns and the blue sky contrasted beautifully that day, and a view from the hill was breathtaking.
I took almost the same picture ten times because every few steps the view seemed to be a little bit nicer and every few meters I noticed something new.
I fell in love with old, majestic trees with their wide trunks and branches full of leaves. I can totally imagine living in this gray stone house with an old tree in front of it and with that beautiful view over the city.
From the top of the citadel we saw street markets on the other side of the river and we decided to go there to look for some lunch. After lunch we walked along the banks of river to take some more pictures of the citadel and we returned back to the city center where we were walking down the streets and taking pictures of nice store fronts and houses.
We also planned to go for a coffee and cake and I selected two highly recommended spots on trip advisor but unfortunately because of the national holiday both places were closed. So next time we go to Namur I'll make sure they are open.


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-Ron Blake (Solo Artist / The Juilliard School / Saturday Night Live Band / Christian McBride Big Band)
Virgin Islands native Ron Blake currently resides in New York City. He has released four recordings as a leader; in addition, his discography numbers over 60 recordings as a guest and sideman. He is a member of NBC's Saturday Night Live Band (2005) and is on faculty at the Juilliard School (2007).
Blake took up the saxophone at age 10 in St. Thomas public schools. He attended the National Music Camp (79-81) and graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy (80-82), later matriculating into Northwestern University (1986). After graduation from Northwestern, Blake worked extensively in the Chicago area before being appointed to the faculty of the University of South Florida in Tampa in 1990.
In 1992, Blake re-located to New York joining Roy Hargrove's Quintet. In addition to his contemporaries, he's worked with many masters including Art Farmer and Roy Haynes.
Blake's debut recording Up Front and Personal with special guest Johnny Griffin was released came in 2000. He completed a Masters degree at NYU in 2010. His releases on Mack Avenue include Lest We Forget, SONIC TONIC, and Shayari, and he won a Grammy as a member of Christian McBride's Big Band in 2011 for their release, The Good Feeling. In addition he has two Grammy nominations with Gerald Wilson Orchestra, New York, New Sound in 2011 & Yerba Buena, President Alien in 2005. Most recently, Blake won his 2nd Grammy in 2017, again with the Christian McBride Big Band (Bringin' It) and received an Emmy (2016-17) for his contributions to Saturday Night Live as a member of the SNL Band.
Blake co-founded the 21st Century Band and the Tahmun record label with Dion Parson in 1998. Since then he's continued to work as a performer and educator through his affiliation with the 21st Century Band, the VI United Jazz Foundation, and his appointment at the Juilliard School. His working relationship with bassist Christian McBride spans over 15 years, as a member of the Christian McBride Band and other projects. In 2017, Ron became the Artistic Director of the 21st Century Band Jazz Institute at Snow Pond in Sidney, Maine.
In January 2014, Blake received recognition from the U.S. Congress and the Virgin Islands Legislature for his commitment to education and his music accomplishments.
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AQ Feature
Logistics: Shipping on the Panama Canal
BY Liliana Rivera and Yossi Sheffi
From issue: The New Brazil and the Changing Hemisphere, Spring 2011
The Panama Canal Expansion Program (PCEP), launched in September 2007 and scheduled for completion in 2014, is expected by its proponents to have the greatest impact on global shipping of any project underway today. Once completed, the $5.5 billion project will roughly triple the size of vessels that can pass through the Canal, from the current maximum of 4,400 20-foot equivalent units (TEU) to 12,600 TEU.
In a December 2010 article, The New York Times echoed the general consensus that the project will lead to "the biggest shift in the freight business since the 1950s, when sea-faring ships began carrying goods in uniform metal containers."
Nevertheless, at the midpoint of the project's timeline, there are important questions about what has been achieved to date, and in particular, about how effectively ports outside Panama will be able to handle the larger ships and the associated increased volume of traffic.
For the Autoridad del Canal de Panamá (ACP), the good news is that 19 percent of the work was completed by the end of 2010. Expansion is focused on four primary areas: the construction of new locks on the Pacific and Atlantic sides; excavation of new locks for the channel's northern access; improvements to existing navigational channels; and improvements to the Canal's water supply and draft dependability.
Phases one and two of the excavation of the Pacific Access Channel are complete. These first steps—clearing land, including a former munitions range—were necessary for further expansion and the relocation of roads. Initial work also focused on preparing for construction of the third set of locks. This will be led by the Grupo Unidos por el Canal (GUPC)—a conglomerate including Spain's Sacyr Vallehermoso, Italy's Impregilo, Belgium's dredging and marine engineering company Jan de Nul, and Panama's largest construction company Constructora Urbana SA (CUSA).
Phases three and four are ongoing. They involve further land-clearing and excavation activities, including the excavation for lock chambers, lock heads and water control mechanisms. Additionally, the dredging of the Pacific and Atlantic entrance navigational channels is moving forward, as is the work in Gatun Lake and the Culebra Cut, an artificial valley that cuts through the continental divide in Panama.
To complete the configuration of the locks' hydraulic system, GUPC contracted Compagnie National du Rhône to build a model of the locks in Lyon, France, that tests competing engineering designs. Project managers chose rolling floodgates successfully used in Europe, especially in Belgium, appropriate to the size of the future locks. The first floodgate design is almost finished and its construction should start in 2011.
A strike, along with heavy rains that battered Panama in 2010, caused the canal's first closure in over 20 years. Nevertheless, the ACP reports that the expansion is on schedule. In 2011, the contractor for phase four of the excavation of the Pacific Access Channel is expected to start construction of the Borinquen 1E dam, the first to be built in the canal area in the last 75 years. In addition, 2011 should witness the pouring of concrete for the new set of locks on the Pacific and Atlantic sides.
Beyond Panama
The PCEP will affect freight shipments throughout the Americas, opening opportunities for new transportation routes, distribution patterns and logistics hubs formation. Today, the fastest and preferred way to send cargo from China to the eastern U.S.—Shanghai to New York in 19–22 days—is by a combination of ship and rail. Avoiding rail and using the Panama Canal, the same cargo arrives in 25–26 days; the Suez Canal route takes 27–28 days. This is the reason that 75 percent of Asian imports use the West Coast route (with Los Angeles/Long Beach ports accounting for 43 percent of this volume) and only 19 percent use the Panama Canal. With the expansion, larger Post-Panamax ships (so-called because they will be larger than the Canal's current 4,500 TEU limit) will be able to sail directly to the eastern U.S., lowering shipping costs. But the ship-rail combination will still be quicker.
Traffic diversion estimates vary widely. Most observers put the maritime traffic gains through the expanded canal at between 20 and 35 percent of the current West Coast freight. Naturally, this will also depend on the toll levied by the ACP. Currently the ACP charges each ship $72 per unit of container- capacity; so a 4,500 TEU vessel pays $324,000 to use the canal, whether loaded or empty. Given its past practice, the ACP likely will continue to segment the market and charge fees based on a user's ability to pay. This maximizes traffic and revenues.
To capture some of the new traffic, projects to deepen harbors and expand rail and capacity handling are underway in almost all large ports on the U.S. East Coast and along the Gulf of Mexico. For example, the Port of Norfolk, Virginia, which is 50 feet deep and currently the only port on the eastern U.S. coast that can handle the Post-Panamax ships, is focused on maintaining unrestricted navigation in the port to allow easier access for these vessels.
The Port of Charleston, South Carolina, is investing in maintaining its current depth through a continuous dredging program, while also deepening the harbor further. At the Port of New York/New Jersey, work is underway to increase deepwater capacity; plans are also underway to raise the roadbed of the Bayonne Bridge to allow for passage of Post-Panamax ships. The Port of Tampa has an ongoing terminal expansion to quadruple its size. The Port of Miami is establishing an intermodal container rail service and expanding supporting rail and bridge infrastructure. Savannah Harbor is being dredged.
In addition, the Gulf of Mexico ports in Gulfport, Mississippi, and Mobile, Alabama, along with the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway have signed memoranda of understanding with the ACP to encourage increased traffic in the Gulf. Other ports striking agreements with the authority include Houston, Boston, Miami, New Orleans, Charleston, and Tampa.
These massive investments in port infrastructure may be a case of too much investment chasing too little freight. The highest estimates of increased Post-Panamax ship traffic have failed to take into account several factors.
First among them, the competitive response of the existing players. Some of the West Coast ports including Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Portland, Seattle, and Tacoma have banded together with the western railroads, chiefly Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) and Union Pacific (UP), to form the U.S. West Coast Collaboration (USWCC) with the purpose of guaranteeing competitive cost and service options for West Coast ports.
Second, as some traffic starts to be diverted through the canal and as port congestion decreases, the efficiency of the West Coast ports will improve. This improved service will attract shipping carriers and ocean liners to the ship-rail operation, thereby dampening the long-term increase in canal traffic.
Additionally, while the ACP and the Panamanian government have said that a principal reason for the expansion program is to increase the rate of transshipments and related logistics operations in Panama, such an increase may not necessarily take place. Many other ports in the Caribbean (including Cuba, should U.S. relations improve) stand ready to unload Post-Panamax vessels and transfer their cargo to smaller boats that can navigate any East Coast port.
And finally, increased focus on the environment and carbon pricing in the future may favor the West Coast route. The reason: CO2 emissions per TEU for a large Panamax vessel going through a West Coast port and using the rail for inland distribution are, on average, only two-thirds of the emissions involved in a trip through the Panama Canal to an East Coast port.
In essence, while the Panama Canal Expansion Project seeks to maintain the dominance of the Panama Canal as the preferred method for shipping goods, the canal's continued importance is not guaranteed. That means authorities must design a strategy that creates incentives and offers competitive prices to attract the level of shipping business that will justify the enormous expense and effort of this project. Such a strategy will involve increased cooperation between the canal, Atlantic Coast port operators, East Coast railroads, and local as well as state governments along the Atlantic Coast.
It is therefore difficult to predict the consequences of the Panama Canal enlargement. The project will certainly lead to increased competition between ports and carriers and, in this, the shippers will be the clear winners. Atlantic Coast ports may experience some growth in traffic, but it may be less than what is suggested by the optimistic forecasts that are the basis for investments in these ports.
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Tags: Panama, Panama Canal, Policy update, Liliana Rivera, Yossi Sheffi
Panama, 30 Years Later, Is Thriving
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Como Una Periodista Inspiró un Movimiento Contra la Corrupción en Panamá


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His ministry..our ministry
As we launch into green season today, we also launch into an extended presentation of the ministry of Jesus: his preaching, his healing, the ways he interacted with people, the stories he told. But before we really get going together on this new phase of the church year, let's just note that it's a quite different kind of season than where we've been so far. The Lent-Triduum-Easter cycle, as well as the Advent-Christmas cycle, which have dominated the year for us so far, are powerful and clear seasons that are meant to have powerful and clear results in us. During those seasons, we re-encounter the key landmarks in what Christians see as the central narrative of the universe.
Each year those cycles have work to do in us, which is to make God's saving acts vividly present. And each year we have work to do with them, which is to let everything we are going through this particular year get brought into conversation with God's saving acts and opened up to them. When both parts of that equation are in play, Christmas and Easter get some purchase right in the middle of our lives and are able to make specific changes in us. They do that incrementally, year by year, some years far more obviously than others; but that's what can happen, if you're willing to make the investment, in those powerful cycles we call Advent-Christmas and Lent-Easter.
This green season is a bit different. It doesn't feature dramatic landmarks like God taking on human flesh, or pouring out his lifeblood on the cross for us. The green season presumes all that has happened already. It presumes we've already done the purple and white and red seasons; we've met Christ among us at Christmas, we've put our whole trust in his death and resurrection at Lent and Easter, and we've been filled with his Spirit at Pentecost. The green season presumes we're now ready to live out what God did for us in this year's big landmark seasons.
Cameron Barnard's Senior Address
Hello everyone, my name is Cameron Barnard. I am a cradle Episcopalian who was raised by the Emmanuel Memorial Episcopal Church family. I would like to share with all of you my story about being an acolyte at Emmanuel and how acolyting and this church have bettered me in a number of ways.
As many of you might already know, I have been an acolyte here for about seven years. I witnessed my older brother Garrett acolyte plenty of times, and he always made it look so easy, so I was excited to learn for myself. At my first ever service as an acolyte, I was given the assignment of carrying the flags in, which unfortunately is no longer a position at the church. On that day, I remember getting nervous because I had no idea what to expect. My first hurdle was figuring out what to wear. For the first few services, I didn't know which color robes to wear on which days, so I would always wait and see what other acolytes had on and mirror them. Then came the actual acolyting duties. I was glad to find out that first day that really all the flag carrier had to do was to process in with the flag and just sit at the altar all service long and then take the flag back out during the recession hymn.
It wasn't until about a year later that I really had to face my first real challenge as an acolyte. I was given the task of being a server for the first time, which included many more jobs than being a flag carrier. I and another server accepted the responsibility of carrying the torches in, moving the book before the gospel reading, bringing the torches out to the middle of the pews for the gospel reading, setting out and cleaning up the bread and wine for the communion and carrying the torches back out during the recession. While these duties may sound easy now looking back, it was very intimidating for a shy eleven year old like me. My first couple of times were not perfect, but I continued to serve at the altar because I felt a certain responsibility toward my church.
Eventually I was assigned to carry the cross and to perform as Master of Ceremonies, MC for short. Both included completely new tasks that I had to learn and master every Sunday, and the latter role also required me to know all the tasks of the other acolytes because, as MC, I was tasked with being their leader. Learning to accept leadership responsibilities through my church service eventually translated well into my leadership roles as a class officer at Central High School and as a swim team captain.
There have been many bumps in the road during this long seven-year journey, but freely accepting the duties of an acolyte here at Emmanuel has been the greatest decision I ever made in my life. Acolyting has taught me so many important qualities such as leadership, character, and responsibility just to name a few; in addition, serving at the altar has made me feel closer to God than any other experience at Emmanuel. I believe that Emmanuel has been one of the biggest factors for my success in life so far, and I would just like to thank Deacon Chris, the late Larry Bouton, and all the priests I've ever worked with for giving me the opportunity to come many Sundays and learn something new about myself; moreover, I owe each of them a debt of gratitude for their patience with, compassion toward, and care for me. I will forever cherish the help everyone at Emmanuel has given me along the way, and I look forward to taking all that I have learned here and continuing to better myself as both an Episcopalian and a college student in the next chapter of my life.
All together, filled with the Spirit
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place… and all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.
If the folks who make up Emmanuel's participating community were ever all together in this place, we would not be able to fit in the nave. But we never are. Any given Sunday, probably about 40% of us are actually together, and it's different ones each week. This is less true at the 8:00, which is more stable as a sort of small group within the parish, but across both services, there's never really a quorum on any one Sunday. I'm not talking the whole church mailing list, I'm talking people who are currently taking part in our life together in some way, but who have not had the experience of being all together in one place the way our first lesson describes.
That's a situation many American churches are facing, and I think we're right on track with national averages. Having a different group at worship Sunday to Sunday poses a lot of challenges for any church, but one of them is that the kind of unity in spirit and solidarity in mission that took place on the first Pentecost is becoming a rare experience for many Christians in the USA. The entire church at Pentecost was all together in one place, praying and seeking God, and that is when the Holy Spirit fell. Unity of spirit and solidarity of mission, with everyone on board.
But it wasn't just that first feast of Pentecost. It has happened like that throughout the history of the church. There is something about groups of people who are really together that the Holy Spirit seems to find very attractive – if you've ever been part of a Christian community that was of one heart and soul, all in the same place, where a quorum was available to be deployed by the Spirit for God's work, you know what I'm talking about. The Spirit falls on communities of people like that. The Spirit goes to work through communities of people like that. And being part of a community where that is happening is a life-changing experience for anyone who has had it.


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HomeNews ReportsPakistanis celebrate as prominent Gulf personalities joined hands with Indian Muslims in targeting the...
Updated: 18 April, 2020
Pakistanis celebrate as prominent Gulf personalities joined hands with Indian Muslims in targeting the beleaguered Hindus in the Middle East
Princess Hend Al Qassimi, a member of the royal family of the United Arab Emirates, recently targeted a Hindu man for standing up against Tablighi Jamaat apologists
After it was revealed that a bunch of Indian Muslims are brazenly teaming up to brand the gainfully employed Hindus in the Middle East countries as Sanghis and get them evicted for raising unpopular opinion on the Social Media, Pakistanis on Twitter have welcomed the sinister development, lauding the Arab countries for condemning and deporting the Hindus for making critical remarks against the Muslims.
A Pakistani, Muhammad Ibrahim Qazi, took to Twitter to express his gratitude for the Arab countries who have colluded with the Indian Muslims in repatriating Indian Hindus, and in some cases punishing them for voicing disapproving remarks against the misguided Muslim practices and beliefs.
The Arab postures from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and UAE to condemn and deport the violent Hindu extremism against Muslims is a welcome change.
— Muhammad Ibrahim Qazi (@miqazi) April 18, 2020
Of late, there has been a host of incidents when Hindus settled in the Middle East country have been unwarrantedly attacked by the gang of Indian Muslims for simply stating uncomfortable facts. Recently, they had managed to get a Hindu man in UAE in trouble for making comments against Muslims in TikTok who were claiming that offering Namaz for five times a day was enough to ward off the threat off the Wuhan Coronavirus. Rakesh B. Kitturmath, who worked as a team leader at Emrill Services, an integrated facilities management (FM) headquartered in Dubai, was terminated from his job on Thursday. He is currently facing the prospect of doing jail time in Dubai for allegedly insulting Islam. This, while he had not insulted 'Islam' rather mocked the people on Tik Tok saying that doing Namaz regularly will save them from Coronavirus, which is true, a mockworthy assertion to begin with.
Earlier, Mitesh Udeshi, an Abu Dhabi resident, was fired from his job for simply posting a cartoon on his Facebook page. Soon after he uploaded the picture, the posse of Indian Muslims started attacking him, accusing him of insulting Islam. In another case, a police complaint was filed against Sameer Bhandari in Dubai after he asked a Muslim job seeker from India to go back to Pakistan.
Such retributory actions against the Indian Hindus are often carried out under the auspices of prominent personalities in the Middle East countries who covertly extend their support to the gang of Indian Muslims under the pretext of initiating action against the hate speech.
One such individual who has joined hands with the Indian Muslims in targeting the Hindus domiciled in the Gulf countries is Princess Hend Al Qassimi, a member of the royal family of the United Arab Emirates. Portraying herself as a crusader against hate speech, Qassimi recently rebuked a Hindu man named Saurabh Upadhyay based out of Dubai for simply reiterating the facts about the criminal role of Tablighi Jamaat members in the spread of the coronavirus in India.
Anyone that is openly racist and discriminatory in the UAE will be fined and made to leave. An example; pic.twitter.com/nJW7XS5xGx
— Princess Hend Al Qassimi (@LadyVelvet_HFQ) April 15, 2020
However, Saurabh's posts highlighting the culpability of Tablighi Jamaat in contributing towards India's most potent coronavirus hotspot that resulted in a huge surge in the number of COVID-19 cases across the country was branded by Qassimi as a clear manifestation of hate-speech. The censorious remarks that Saurabh made against Tablighi Jamaat members were very cunningly portrayed by her as being aimed towards the Muslim community at large. For his critical statement against Tablighi Jamaat apologists, Saurabh was termed as "openly racist and discriminatory" by Qassimi on Twitter and threatened with fine and deportation from the UAE.
Gulf countries
irena akbar
Islamists


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Mrs. Theresa Minix
Theresa (nee Vellutato) Minix, age 88, of Gibbstown died Monday July 14, 2014 in her home. She was born on January 24, 1926 in Girard, OH, the daughter of the late Julius and Margaret (nee Gattuso) Vellutato. On September 14, 1957, she married Randolph Minix Jr. She was a cook and worked with her mom at Vellutato's. She also worked at the Italian Villa, the Dutch Inn and at Mobile Research. She enjoyed trips with her famly to the Outer Banks Fishing and to Saratoga, NY to the horse races. She joined her brother Joe's band on trips singing. Mrs. Minix enjoyed cooking holiday meals for the whole family. She was a member of St. Clare of Assisi RC Church and the Ladies' Auxillary of Gibbstown. She is survived by her son, Randolph M. III and Tammi Minix of Gibbstown; sister, Pauline and the late Michael Salvatore of Paulsboro; brothers, James and Janice Vellutato of Mickleton, Julius and Susan Vellutato of Glendale, AZ, Francis and Virginia Vellutato of Clarksboro; nieces, nephews, in-laws and cousins. Mrs. Minix was predeceased by her husband Randolph Minix, Jr.; brothers, John, Joe, Arthur and James. A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated at 10:30 am Monday July 21, 2014 in St. Clare of Assisi Parish, St. Michael's Church, 313 Memorial Ave., Gibbstown. Relatives and friends may visit with the family Sunday evening from 6 to 8 pm and Monday morning after 9:30 am in the church until Mass time. Interment Gloucester County Veterans Cemetery. Arrangements by McBride-Foley Funeral Home, Paulsboro. In lieu of flowers, contributions can be made in her memory to Guardian Angels Regional School, 150 S. School St., Gibbstown, NJ 08027. Memories can be shared at www.mcbridefoleyfh.com.
Theresa (nee Vellutato) Minix, age 88, of Gibbstown died Monday July 14, 2014 in her home. She was born on January 24, 1926 in Girard, OH, the daughter of the late Julius and Margaret (nee Gattuso) Vellutato. On September 14, 1957, she married... View Obituary & Service Information
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From I-40, exit Eastchester Dr. (HWY 68), head south approximately 2.4 miles to Willard Dairy Rd (6th stop light), turn right. Community approx. 1.3 miles straight ahead. The Trellises is located on the corner of Willard Dairy & Barrow Rd.
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Close to everything, The Trellises is located minutes from shopping, restaurants, Southwest Schools, the Palladium and I40, as well as being minutes from Greensboro, Downtown High Point, Winston-Salem and the rest of the Triad.


When hunting for a lost volume the other day, I found a book about oysters. In it, I discovered that our house, built in 1851, dates from the time of the great oyster boom, when half a billion of the bivalves were being sold at Billingsgate each year. Oysters had been plentiful before the Victorian era-Dr Johnson famously fed them to his cat.
But the railways made it possible for them to be transported at speed. Around the mud-flats near Colchester, the celebrated natives had to be supplemented by ringers: oysters from other beds that were merely thrown into the waters around Mersea Island to fatten. Incidentally, the Victorians didn't hold with there having to be an 'r' in the month. Their oyster season started on August 4. When the doors at Billingsgate opened at midnight of August 3, people would be killed in the stampede.
After the boom, collapse. There was a Royal Commission, which completely failed to identify overfishing or pollution as culprits-and, in the days of laissez-faire, would have done nothing about them if it had. Oysters became a food of the rich. I'd be afraid of opening one for fear of gouging my thumb. It's different in France, where they're expensive, but sold outside many of the big brasseries in Paris. Bless the French. Why can't we do that here?