Do Shopping Bag Fees Send the Wrong Message?

I first came across the concept of shopping bags fees during a 2007 trip to Venice.  After a couple of days of wondering where one bought groceries in Venice, I eagerly shopped when I spotted a grocery store in Lido, across the Venetian Lagoon from my Venice apartment.

As the checker tallied my purchases, which were something like two boxes of crackers, two bottles of water, and laundry detergent, she asked if I wanted shopping bags.  The question puzzled me.  How did she think I could otherwise get home with my unwieldy purchases, especially with the vaporetto ride back across the lagoon?  I ascribed the question to her limited English and my complete absence of Italian.  I conveyed that shopping bags would be appreciated and used two fingers to confirm her guess of how many I’d need.

It was only when I was back in my apartment that I found I’d been charged 10 cents for each bag.  I wasn’t offended by the charges, assuming it was a local practice, one that seemed reasonable to me.  As I recall, I paid for bags during the remainder of my stay in Venice, never figuring out that I should be taking along a bag from earlier purchases when going out to shopping.

Having been introduced to shopping bag fees, I was a supporter when the idea followed me home to the U.S.  Clearly, there were resources that went into creating the bags, resources that could be saved if a shopper were to bring along a reusable bag.  Today, my wife and I have perhaps eight shopping bags stashed in the rear of our car, bags to cover every eventuality.  I’m fine with this new shopping bag reality.

But there was a moment during the weeks before Christmas, as I looked at a tower of cardboard boxes accumulated from online gift shopping, when I began thinking there might be a flaw in the concept of shopping bag fees.

Simply put, is it reasonable to charge a fee for a plastic bag at a local store, but not to charge for the cardboard needed to deliver packages from websites?  Doesn’t that policy act as a disincentive, admittedly a small one but still a discentive, to shop at local stores, the only kind of stores that will ever be walkable?

To put numbers to my concern, I made assumptions and did calculations for a frequent purchase made by my wife and me.

We have a canine household, with the dog population moving between two and four.  A staple at mealtimes is canned pumpkin.

(Not that I would recommend checking with an urbanist blog for advice on pet feeding, but for those readers intrigued by canned pumpkin as dog food, I’ll note that many dog authorities recommend pumpkin over canned dog food, specifically noting the nutrition and the benefits to canine coats.  And please note that it’s canned pumpkin that’s recommended, not canned pumpkin pie filling which contains spices not recommended for dogs.)

For years, my wife and I monitored sales on canned pumpkin in local stores, stocking up heavily when prices were good.  But as internet shopping matured, we found that we could buy a better grade of pumpkin online, at a comparable or even lower price.  So we switched over.  For the pricing practices of the site we use, the sweet spot for quantity is twenty cans, so a UPS driver staggers to our porch every few months with an unwieldy box containing twenty cans of pumpkin.

That twenty-can pumpkin order will be my point of packaging comparison.

For the local store purchase, assuming that I consistently forget to bring reusable bags, ten plastic bags would be required.  (I once had a mishap trying to put three pumpkin cans in a plastic bag, so two will be my limit.)  Although internet estimates vary, a weight per bag of 6 grams seems the mean value, which gives us 75 bags per pound.

So the ten plastic bags needed for twenty cans of pumpkin would weigh 0.08 pounds and have a bag fee, at 10 cents per bag, of $1.00.

For the internet alternative, the cardboard packaging, including double boxing and additional spacers to keep the cans from shifting, is about 30 square feet in area.  Using a typical cardboard thickness of 3/16 of an inch, an assumption that the cardboard can be crushed to half its thickness, and a weight of cardboard of 43 pounds per cubic foot, that would be 10 pounds of cardboard.

And the cost to me for that 10 pounds of cardboard?  Unless I assign a value to the time needed to break down the boxes and to squeeze them into the recycling can, it’s zero.

At this point, I know that attentive and critically-thinking readers will have objections to make.  I’ll try to anticipate and to respond to those concerns.

Perhaps the weight of cardboard is greater, but the environmental impacts of the plastic, from oil drilling to ocean accumulations of plastic waste, are much greater per pound.

Agreed, but cardboard isn’t without environmental impacts.  This recent New York Times article gives a good summary of the costs of the cardboard economy, from the delivery of boxes to individual homes to the water used in recycling.  As the weight of cardboard to deliver 20 cans of pumpkin is approximately 125 times the weight of plastic for the same delivery, it seems likely that the environmental impacts of the cardboard are greater.

The cardboard isn’t free.  Its costs are folded into the business model of the internet company.

I agree that nothing is free.  But that’s the same argument that was used by the anti-bag fee folks.  But the reality was that the only way to get people to commit en masse to reusable bags was to make the fee separate and optional.  The bag fees created a tipping point for bagging of local purchases.  No similar tipping point has been created for shipping of online purchases.

A fundamental difference between local stores and internet businesses is that one we can’t bring reusable boxes to an internet shipping site.

That’s true, but there are changes we could make to better reflect the true cost of internet shipping and to allow people to reduce their costs by wise shopping decisions.

Internet sellers could be required to charge based on the bulk of item being shipped rather than solely the value, including supplemental charges if the order must be filled from multiple warehouses in multiple packages.

Shipping could include a surcharge to reimburse cities for the additional wear on streets from the growing fleet of delivery trucks.

An option could be implemented by which items are bulk-shipped in large, reusable boxes to service centers where they’re unloaded and stored until consumers can drop by to collect them.  Or perhaps a courier could deliver the unboxed items.  Your new book, your neighbor’s new shirt, and your friend’s new toaster could travel from the warehouse in a single large box, without few if any supplemental shipping materials.

And there are probably other, even better, ideas which smarter minds could devise.

 

None of this is meant to argue against bag fees.  I thought they were a good idea in Venice in 2007 and I think they’re a good idea today.  But if we don’t want bag fees to serve as yet another impediment to local, potentially walkable, businesses, we should make a similar effort to ensure that the true costs of internet shipping are being imposed.

I’ve previously written of my support for a vehicle mileage tax (VMT).  I’d prefer that a VMT be implemented in parallel to the gas tax because the two taxes address different aspects of driving, but would be reluctantly amenable to having a VMT in place of a gas tax.  As a result, I’m pleased that the State of California is implementing a pilot program to test a VMT.  I’ll write more in my next post.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Urbanism and Senior Living: Defining the Question

In the early days of this blog, when I was still young and naïve, I described three seminal steps in my progress from being someone who accepted drivable suburbia as eternal to someone who would call himself an urbanist.

One of those steps was an observation made during a 2007 trip to Venice.  Below, I quote my younger and more naïve self.

“One evening, I dined in a trattoria on the Piazza San Toma.  (Best gnocchi I’ve ever had.)  As I ate, an elderly gentleman entered.  He was perhaps in his late 70s, tall and fit.  His clothes showed wear, but were in good repair and nicely pressed.   He carried a sparklingly clean pottery bowl.

“My Italian was limited, but I could discern that he wanted a double order of a favorite pasta to take it back to his apartment to share with his wife, who was physically unable to come to the trattoria.   The proprietor of the trattoria knew the gentleman and greeted him with warmth and enthusiasm.   Several friends who were dining in a rear room were advised of his presence.  They came forward to sit with him as he awaited his order.

“The conversation, although far beyond my ability to understand, was voluble and good-natured.  Even the son of the proprietor, who clearly wanted to be elsewhere on the warm spring evening, talked familiarly with the gentleman and smiled for the first time all evening.”

In the three years since I wrote those words, I’ve had many opportunities to observe the American approach to eldercare.  Between my wife and me, we’ve either coordinated or observed as numerous parents, uncles, and aunts made the transition from family homes to senior care facilities.  Not all made the transition directly.  Some spent time in other settings, such as RVs or mountain cabins, enjoying the early years of their retirements.  But all have concluded their journeys in senior care facilities, whether assisted or independent living.

Remarkably, all but one have been pleased by the transition.  And the ones who resisted the move with tenacity now regret their obstinacy.  (The one hold-out continues to buck medical advice and demands to return to his former home.  But every time he gets there, he suffers a relapse and is hauled back to the hospital.  There can be bull-headed geriatrics, especially at the age of 89.)

But as content as my various relatives and in-laws may be in their new settings, I still think back to the Venetian gentleman.  I suspect that none of the Americans seniors I know experience moments as exhilarating as the trattoria reunion I witnessed.

However, I’ve also come to wonder about the remainder of the Venetian gentleman’s daily life.  Living with an invalid wife on a minor Venetian plaza, how does he spend his winter days?  Sitting at a window watching the rain lash the empty pavement?  Compared to that life, bingo in the recreation room of a senior living facility may look attractive.

I suspect that there is a way to combine the comfort and security of the American approach to eldercare with the backslapping moments of greeting the Venetian friends with whom one has lived a life.  The Venn diagram overlap may be small, but I’ll wager that it exists.  And I’m positive that the overlap lies within the area of walkable urbanism.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll explore different aspects of how urbanism can make better lives for senior citizens, from transit to housing options to socialization to walkability.  And I’ll be eager for the input of others.  If we work together, perhaps we can have solutions in place by the time I need them.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Venice 2007: The San Michele Cimitere

For a holiday respite, I devoted my Friday posts through December and January to recounting a trip I took to Venice in 2007. Using photos and notes from the trip, I highlighted the urbanist issues of day-to-day life in perhaps the most famous car-free city in the world.

I reached the end of January without exhausting the stories and insights that I’d hoped to share.  Venice is too fascinating to leave with tales untold, so I’ve continued with occasional Friday posts into February and beyond.  Today will be another of those extra posts.

In the history of this blog, I’ve mentioned cemeteries exactly one time.  But the subject may have found resonance with the readers.  The mention was in a comparison of Savannah and Charleston.  After earlier posts which balanced the two cities on elements such as restaurants and parks, I tried to sum up the comparison by deciding in which city I’d prefer to live.  I came down in favor of Savannah for several reasons, one of which was the way they embraced their cemeteries, acknowledging the circle of life.

I was comfortable in my conclusions, but expected the post to quickly slip beneath the waves of the constantly churning internet.  I was wrong.  Slightly more than a year later, barely a week goes by without another twenty to thirty people reading that post.  By total readership, it’s the most popular post I’ve ever written, by a factor of more than two.

I don’t know what draws people to that post.  It might be Savannah residents pleased that I gave the nod to their fair city.  It might be Charleston residents astonished that I could cast aspersions on their racial progress.  Or perhaps the reference to Savannah cemeteries was the key factor.

In any case, it seemed appropriate to check if the cemetery reference was key by writing about the Venetian cemetery.  Plus, the San Michele Cimitere is worth writing about.

For many years, Venetians buried their dead beneath the paving stones of their courtyards and pedestrian ways.  I recall one particular courtyard where an estimated 25,000 plague victims had been buried, but most of the burials elsewhere in the city were unmarked.  (That practice must add a little spice to the life of contemporary utility workers.  Every shovelful of dirt for a utility trench offers a possible surprise.)

In the early 19th century, a Venetian doge finally decided that downtown burials were a bad idea.  He directed that all future burials would be on the small island of San Michele, between Venice and the glass-making island of Murano.

It was a reasonable decision.  San Michele already had a chapel and a small graveyard.  Expansion was a reasonable course.  And likely profitable to the family that owned San Michele.

The vaporetto to Murano makes a scheduled stop at the San Michele dock.  I hadn’t necessarily planned on visiting San Michele, but while traveling to Murano one day made the abrupt decision to disembark for a look around.

It was a good decision.  San Michele is a tidy little cemetery, tightly oriented and well-maintained.  I can’t think of a single U.S. cemetery that projects quite the sense of order of San Michele.  It offers a number of settings, from enclosed gardens to broader expanses.  And several of the chapels provide colonnades to help slake my insatiable need for more colonnade photography.

 In a model seen more often in Europe than in the U.S., there are too few plots at San Michele to meet the demand from Venice.  So most plots aren’t sold, but are instead rented for twelve years, after which the remains are relocated to a cemetery on the mainland.

Within the U.S., I know some New Orleans cemeteries follow a similar model, although they rent for the shorter period of seven years.  Here in California, the concept of moving remains may seem macabre, but it’s a reasonable strategy in a place with little land area and a long history.

I have a couple of anecdotes to share from my time wandering about San Michele.  In a far corner, I came across the grave of Sergei Diaghilev, the Russian impresario who first introduced Russian ballet to the western world.  I didn’t know that he’d been buried in Venice and was pleased to have found his gravel by chance.

I was even more pleased to see that he hadn’t been forgotten.  Decorating his grave were tokens left by other visitors, used ballet slippers, ballet programs, and tickets from recent ballet performances.

I’ve seen similar tributes at the graves of sports figures, such as Joe DiMaggio’s grave in Colma, but it was my first time to see a similar reaction to someone in the arts.  Especially when Diaghilev has been gone for 85 years.  In a world where many of us will be forgotten 85 days after we’re gone, it’s good to see that some fame is more long-lasting,

As I neared the end of my visit, I came across a custodian who was locking up a chapel.  To my surprise, he

was wearing a San Francisco Giants ballcap.  It was worn and frayed, but still clearly a baseball cap.  Being a baseball fan, I was intrigued to learn how a Giants cap ended up on the head of an elderly, stooped custodian in a Venetian cemetery.

But I feared that he would have little English, so kept my words to a minimum.  After wishing him a good day in one of my few Italian phrases, I pointed to the cap and asked “San Francisco Giants?”  He looked back impassively.

Thinking that Barry Bonds might be too recent and too controversial, I went further back in my next effort “Willie Mays?”  Still nothing.

Going for an Italian connection, I tried “Joe DiMaggio?”  There was no Giant connection, but the San Francisco tie was strong.  Nonetheless, there was still no reaction.

So I rolled out my final effort, a true incendiary subject for many Giants fans, but with an impeccable Italian tie.  “Tommy Lasorda?”  Still an impassive stare.

I wished him a good day and headed back to the vaporetto stop, resigned to never knowing how the cap found its way to Venice.  I only hope that the custodian got a good laugh of his wife that evening when he told her about the demented American tourist.

San Michele may not have the proximity to Venice that the Colonial Cemetery has to downtown Savannah, but having a regular vaporetto stop that serves only the cemetery may make it even more a part of everyday life.  As in so many things, Venice had responded to its unique setting with urban solutions that feel right.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Venice 2007: Doing Suburbs Right

For a holiday respite, I devoted my Friday posts through December and into January to recounting a trip I took to Venice in 2007. Using photos and notes from the trip, I highlighted the urbanist issues of day-to-day life in perhaps the most famous car-free city in the world.

I’ve now reached the end of January without exhausting the stories and insights that I’d hoped to share.  But Venice is too fascinating for me to depart with tales untold.  So I’ll continue with a few more Venetian posts.  Perhaps not every Friday, but another handful of Fridays over the next couple of months. 

Today, I’ll write of the Venetian suburbs, the communities scattered around the Venetian Lagoon.  Several are remarkably distinctive and quite different from Venice itself.

The Venetian lagoon is a notable model of suburbia, unlike many regions of the Bay Area where the communities seem to run together, with a city limit signs being the only indication that one has moved from one town to the next.  Perhaps the locals can spot the subtle differences, but I find Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Cupertino, and Santa Clara to be virtually indistinguishable.  In the part of the Bay Area where I spent my college years, I can make the same comment about Albany, El Cerrito, Berkeley and the flats of Oakland.

In the North Bay, where I now live, we’re a little luckier.  The happenstance of history and the timely intervention of Urban Growth Boundaries preserved some of the distinctive character of the individual communities.  In Sonoma County, Sebastopol, Sonoma, Healdsburg, and Petaluma have different feels.  Even Rohnert Park and Cotati, which sit uncomfortably close together, retain different characters.

But nothing in the North Bay can compare to the range of personalities of the communities scattered around the Venetian lagoon.  Let me take you on a quick tour of three towns.

Early during my time in Venice, I found myself at loose ends late in an afternoon, unsure of how to spend the final hours of the day before my evening meal.  I hopped a random vaporetto to see where it would take me.  The surprise destination was Lido, a community on the sandbar that separates the lagoon from the Adriatic Sea.

Most of what I’d been told about Lido was negative.  Specific complaints were that it was bland and it had cars.  (And one cousin noted it as the setting for “Death in Venice”, a book for which he seemed to hold little affection.)

But I liked Lido.  It reminded me of Southern California beach towns I visited in the early 1960s.  Except that it seemed tidier than those towns.  The streets were clean, the cars well-behaved, and the businesses quietly prosperous.  It was a town to which I returned several times during my trip.

I’ve previously mentioned Murano, the community that I mistakenly thought was Venice proper during my initial arrival in the lagoon.  I returned to Murano several times during my travels, now well-aware that it was a different place and prepared to appreciate it for its own charms.

And it does have charms.  A scaled-down, muted version of Venice, its character is defined by the glass industry.  Although Venice was an early leader in the production of glass, a doge made the reasonable decision that an industry that relied on continually burning furnaces didn’t belong on an island of close-packed homes and little fire-fighting access.  So the glassmakers were exiled to Murano where they made the island their own.

Today, Murano is a cleaner, but less dramatic, version of Venice.  Like on Venice, the primary transportation routes are still canals with no cars on the island, but the aging palazzos are absent and the pedestrian ways are wider and easier to navigate.  And there are enough glass shops and glassmaking operations that one can shop for days without stepping across the same threshold.

But my favorite Venetian community is Burano.  (Yes, there are communities named both Murano and Burano around the Venetian lagoon.  It’s a frequent source of confusion to non-Italians.)  Tucked in the northeast corner of the lagoon, 40 minutes from Venice by vaporetto and only a small length of a tidal arm from Torcello, one of the first settlements on the lagoon, Burano looks almost Scandinavian.  Brightly colored homes line the small, clean canals.  Once again, the palazzos of Venice are absent, but the air of a comfortable middle-class is intoxicating.

Lace is to Burano what glass is to Murano.  Small lace shops line the street leading away from the vaporetto stop.  Shop-owners, primarily women, are happy to open drawers and drawers of lace, looking for the right style and size for any need.  And through partially open doors, one can see elderly women busily making new pieces.

More than Lido or Murano, I could envision spending a week on Burano, taking walks around the perimeter of the small island, learning the local restaurants, and contemplating the comfortable pace of life.

Lido, Murano, and Burano don’t prove that Venetians are particularly adept at good community planning.  A look at the mind-numbing single-use land pattern of Mestre, the city where the viaduct to Venice touches land, quickly disproves that hypothesis.  No, Lido, Murano, and Burano are geographic and historical flukes.

But the character and charm of the three towns show the value of retaining distinctive communities.  The geography of the Venetian lagoon is unique.  There are no true parallels in the Bay Area.  But perhaps we can still learn a few things from the Venetian lagoon.  It’d be better than allowing Anywhere, U.S.A land planning and architecture to define our civic experiences.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Venice 2007: Front Doors in a City without Streets or Sidewalks

For a holiday respite, I’m devoting my Friday posts through December and into January to recounting a trip I took to Venice in 2007. Using photos and notes from the trip, I’m highlighting the urbanist issues of day-to-day life in what may be the most famous car-free city in the world.

My topic for today is Venetian front doors and entries.

In “Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World”, author Ross Chapin writes about the transition between sidewalks and front doors.  He argues that the change from public space to private space should be signaled using landscaping, variation in pavement types, and front porches.

I found his argument reasonable and insightful.  When my wife and I recently made adjustments to our frontyard, we incorporated some of his ideas and were pleased with the result.  We prefer how we sense the transition and we note that pedestrians react to the frontyard differently than before.  They’ve become more engaged with the fountain and the seasonal blooms, but not in a way that interferes with our privacy.

With that confirmation of Chapin’s thoughts about the public to private transition, it’s interesting to look back at the front doors of Venice, a subject that had begun to fascinate me seven years ago.

In the absence of the typical configuration of street and sidewalk, there is far less physical separation between public and private uses in Venice.  The first photo above is of a front door directly off the San Silvestre vaporetto stop.  There was sufficient room for passengers so that no one needed to stand too near the door, but it is still odd to contemplate the equivalent of an American front door exiting into a queue of passengers awaiting a bus.

And many, perhaps most, Venetian front doors directly adjoin narrow pedestrian ways.  One is likely, upon opening a front door, to find a stranger within a couple of feet.  That was certainly true for the front door of the building that contained apartment I rented.

Despite this adjacency of front door to public space, Venetians have found ways, using door materials, door behavior, architecture, and interior design to frame the transition from public to private.  The solutions may provide insights that can be used for in urbanist projects. 

To begin, all Venetian front doors have solidness.  Not all are maintained as well as might be hoped, but all make a statement that what goes on behind them is strictly private.

Next, Venetians don’t linger in the front door.  They slip in and out quickly.  If they want to chat with a neighbor, the door remains closed until the conversation is complete.  Nor are doors ever left open for ventilation.

Last, even during the brief instant that a door is open, little can be seen of the interior of the home.  (It wasn’t that I was being creepy, but over two weeks of wandering the city I got a few lucky glances.)  Even when the front door of one of the grand houses is open, the view was typically an unadorned entry, painted in a neutral shade such as deep tan, and without any artwork in sight.  There was no hint of the life within.

So, how do I think these elements of Venetian front doors should be applied to front doors in American urbanism?

Heavy and solid front doors are always a fine concept.  They’re a good way to connote privacy and security.

The front door behavior of the Venetians seems cold and unwelcoming.  Even if we don’t choose to invite our neighbors inside, standing in an open door to chat seems more convivial than not unlocking the door until the conversation is complete.

I really like having the life of the apartment not quite visible from the front door.  There have been times in my life when a job forced me to knock on the doors of strangers.  From those experiences, I found it unpleasant to have the first view through an opening door be of a squalling infant in a high chair or an indolent youth watching MTV while popping M&Ms.  There are times when a little privacy can be a good thing.

But I find the neutral appearance of Venetian entries to be underwhelming.  I don’t need to see an original Picasso sketch hanging on the wall, but a touch of color or an interesting wall angle would show a little personality.  I’d like to know whether the inhabitants are pale green or burnt orange folks.

Venetians have adapted to a unique set of urban circumstances.  And in those adaptations there are concepts that can be applied to American urbanism.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Venice 2007: Doing the Washing

For a holiday respite, my Friday posts through December and into January have been devoted to recounting a trip I took to Venice in 2007. Using photos and notes from the trip, I’m highlighting the urbanist issues of day-to-day life in what may be the most famous car-free city in the world.

Last week, I wrote about the difficulty of finding services in Venice, absent the land-use configurations and visual clues to which we’re accustomed in the U.S.

But I set aside until this post the subject of doing laundry in Venice.  Not only is laundry a particular challenge, but I made it even more difficult.

Before I left for Venice seven years ago, I checked the internet for laundry options.  There were none.  Absolutely none.  I packed laundry detergent and hand-washed in my apartment.

Seven years later, there’s been little change.  The website europeforvisitors.com offers the following information, “Finding a laundromat in Venice isn't easy, but a handful of Venetian self-service laundries do exist.  … We'll tell you about three modern and easy-to-use launderettes -- one near the Piazza San Marco, another near the Venice railroad station, and a third below the Frari Church.  … We've created a separate page for each laundromat, with photos and walking directions so you won't need to wander aimlessly with a suitcase or backpack full of dirty clothes.”

Three laundromats for a city of 60,000 residents plus a number of visitors that may be nearly as large.  My decision to hand-wash still looks reasonable.

Nor was I the only one in Venice making that decision.  The first photo above is of my apartment.  The shirt hanging from the top window is mine.  And three floors below is the laundry of someone whose taste in shirts seems similar to mine.

Nor was my building the only one to be flying laundry.  As I walked about Venice, drying laundry was a frequent accoutrement, acting as a string of colored banners flapping above the water or the flagstones.

Not only did I devote several mornings of my time in Venice to the domestic task of laundry, but I made the task more difficult than it needed to be.

I wrote earlier about my munchkin apartment.  The apartment is the former attic of the building, which should have been evident from the photos in the earlier post.  Furthermore, the water service wasn’t suited for delivery to my aerie.  I’m guessing that the static pressure in the Venetian water system isn’t very high and that the upper units of every tall building have the same problems I did.

In an email that I sent from Venice, I wrote, “I may have the slowest filling bathtub ever.  …  I start the water, and then wander away for five minutes while two inches of water accumulate.  Read a book, write an email, whatever.  Just occupy myself while the inadequate plumbing struggles along.  The tub has an overflow, but I’m sure it’s only because the plumbing code required it.  Evaporation could keep pace with the fill rate.”

And of course doing hand-washing was equally time-consuming, taking more time away from exploring than I would have wished.

Which is ironic because there was a switch tucked in a corner of the bathroom with a hand-written note taped below it reading “Pompa”.  It wasn’t until my last full day in Venice that I became curious and tried the switch.

I’m sure that all readers have jumped ahead of me.  As should have been blindingly evident to anyone, particular someone with a Masters degree in water resources, “pompa” is Italian for “pump”.   With the switch on, the water flowed quickly into the tub.  Nuts.

Nor was that my only mishap with Venetian plumbing.  There was a dishwasher in my kitchen.  At least I assumed it was a dishwasher.  After all, it was in the kitchen next to the sink.  But I had no reason to use a dishwasher.  I ate all of my bigger meals in restaurants.  On the rare occasion when I ate in the apartment, it was a sandwich from the Rialto market for which I only needed a napkin.  It wasn’t until the end of my trip that I used a dish which I wanted to put in the dishwasher for the maid who would tidy up after I left.

It wasn’t a dishwasher.  It was a washing machine.  A washing machine that have probably worked great when the “pompa” was turned on.  Double nuts.

From a distance of almost seven years, I can poke fun at myself.  I deserve it.  But in at least one way, I don’t mind having been outwitted by Venetian plumbing.

Venice has never been an easy place to live.  It became the longest-lived republic in history through the life-force honed by living in a city of stone buildings constructed on soupy foundations in the middle of a malarial coastal lagoon.

Nor is Venice an easy place to live today. Life is more difficult when groceries must hauled home on foot along convoluted pedestrian routes over innumerable foot bridges, when getting about the city requires squeezing onto nearly-filled vaporetto, and when water pressure is a daily challenge.

To overcome just a few of those difficulties, even if self-created, made me feel that I experienced a bit of the true Venice.  Which was fine.  Besides, happiness more often comes from overcoming hurdles rather than from having every convenience met.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Venice 2007: Locating the Everyday Stuff

For a holiday respite, my Friday posts through December and into January will tell of a trip I took to Venice

in 2007. Using photos and notes that I took at the time, I’ll highlight the urbanist issues of day-to-day life in what may be the most famous car-free city in the world.

In my first four posts, I finished my first day in Venice, having survived a trans-Atlantic redeye, wrangled with a clerk at Marco Polo Airport, inadvertently crossed my landlord’s aging mother, bumped my head into the beams of the converted attic I’ll call home for two weeks, and still found my way to take the favorite photo of my two weeks in Serenissima.

Having used four posts to complete a single day, I need to take a different approach to the remainder of my two weeks.  Beginning today, I’ll write about individual aspects of Venetian life, at least as experienced by an American visitor.  This post will be about the challenges of finding the necessities of apartment life in a city that where the familiar organization and visual clues of U.S. city planning are missing.

The Test: A couple of years ago, I attended a birthday where I dined at the same table with a Nobel Prize winner.  He said something during the meal that stayed with me.  At the time an octogenarian (he has since passed away), he said “Aging isn’t hard once you realize that the systems that once worked on automatic now require manual operation.”

It was insightful advice.  And it has a parallel in being an American in Venice.  The acts of daily life, such as getting on the internet, buying breakfast, or doing laundry, that seem automatic in the U.S. require a higher level of manual operation in Venice.

Internet Access: To be fair to my Venetian landlord, he truthfully advised me that there was no internet access in the apartment he was renting to me.  It may have been the last time that he told me the truth.

He also told me that there were multiple internet cafes in the adjoining plaza of Campo San Polo.  I believed him.  I shouldn’t have.  Not only is there no Internet café in Campo San Polo, I never found an internet café anywhere in the San Polo sestiere.

And I looked at length, taking several long walks in the San Polo and Santa Croce sestieres, shown in these photos.  Lovely places, but without tourist amenities.

(Quick political lesson: Venice has been divided into the same six administrative districts, or sestieres, since the 14th century.  There’s no gerrymandering in Venice.  In addition to San Polo, there are San Marco, Castello, Cannareggio, Santa Croce, and Dorsodoro.  San Marco is the tourist center of town, with the Doge’s Palace, St. Mark’s Basilica, Piazza San Marco, and much of the lodging and tourist retail.  In tourist guides, my sestiere of San Polo is often combined with Santa Croce.  However, there are no Internet cafes in Santa Croce either.)

Admittedly, much of that problem lay in my gullibility.  As a character early in “The City of Falling Angels” says “All Venetians lie, including me when I tell you this.”  Venetian landlords weren’t an exception.

It took several days, but I finally found an internet café in the San Marco sestiere, only a single vaporetto

stop from my apartment.  (More proof of the essential role of the vaporetto to my stay.)

Furthermore, I loved the location of the internet café.  Its windows looked out upon a canal that was frequented by tourist gondolas.  There was nothing more fun than emailing an acquaintance in the Midwest while a gondola glided past only a few feet away.

Computer Recharging: Next, I realized that that my outlet adapter was only for use in Britain.  The camera store about forty feet from my front door sold me a voltage converter that connected to the outlet and the computer, but had too little capacity for my laptop and promptly burned up.  My fault, not theirs.  It was clearly labeled.

It took another couple of days and two trips to the only Venetian hardware store before I had found the correct adaptor.  It was a marvelous urban hardware store, much like Tomasini’s in Petaluma, only with all merchandise delivered by canal barges to a dock at the back door and products that looked almost familiar, but not quite. 

Cash: Remember how my landlord duped me about Internet cafes?  Same thing on ATMs.  His emails to me said that there were several ATMs in Campo San Polo and that he did all his banking there.  I don’t know with whom he banked, but it was like no banking I know.  By actual count, the non-residential uses on the plaza were a 700-year old church, two restaurants, a deli, and a store that sold Beatle memorabilia (I just report it, I don’t explain it).  No ATMs in sight.

The absence of an ATM wasn’t much of a problem, as I found one within a few blocks.  But wouldn’t you think that “I do all my banking there” might be hard to write when there are no banks there?

Groceries: But rising above the other searches for ATMs, internet cafes, etc. was the hunt for food.  I didn’t choose to eat all my meals in restaurants.  But coming from a place where food generally comes from either 50,000 square-foot supermarkets or 15,000 square-foot specialty grocers, finding groceries in Venice was a challenge.  Simply put, it was a land of convenience stores tucked into unlikely places.  (Think unmarked 7-11s on narrow pedestrian byways.)

My first two grocery stops where across the lagoon in Lido.   I stumbled across a store while exploring and returned because I still hadn’t found a store in Venice proper.  Eventually I came across a few stores closer to my apartment, plus I made several purchases in the Rialto Market.

But I was still surprised to find a grocery store only a few hundred feet from my front door on the day before I was to depart.  It was down a small walkway off a bridge that I had crossed many times.  But it was only open for a few hours perhaps five days a week.  Had I spotted it earlier, I could have made good use of it.  But I survived regardless.

If the primary thrust of my trip had been culture or photography, I might have been frustrated by the time required to solve the puzzle of everyday life.  But as my goal instead was to see how to adjust to local life, I found the effort fascinating.  Urban problem-solving as a daily puzzle.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Venice 2007: Beginning to Look About

For a holiday respite, my Friday posts through December and into January will tell of a trip I took to Venice in 2007. Using photos and notes that I took at the time, I’m highlighting the urbanist issues of day-to-day life in perhaps the most famous car-free city in the world.

After three posts, I’ve managed to get myself inside the front door of my well-located but headroom-challenged apartment near the Grand Canal.   In this post, I’ll begin looking around the city that I was to call home for the next two weeks. (Four posts and I’ve barely covered a single day in Serenissima.  I need to move along more quickly.  Maybe next week.)

First Destination: With bags unpacked and a short nap having shaken the worst of cobwebs from a trans-Atlantic red-eye, Venice beckoned with urgency.  The Rialto Bridge seemed an appropriate destination for a first outing.

I took a good look at a map and headed out on foot.  Having learned lessons from my attempt at Venetian pedestrian navigation, I did better this time, ducking into passageways that looked nearly private and crossing over bridges that seemed headed into dead-ends.  A good rule for Venetian pedestrians is that if there isn’t door blocking the way, it’s likely a public route.  And if it’s a public route, it’s likely essential to reaching a fascinating district of the city.

With barely a misstep, I found the Rialto Bridge, passing through an area of enticing restaurants and the end-of-day activities of the Rialto Market, one of the great public markets of the world.

I can take some 1,500 digital photos before downloading photos to my computer and clearing the memory cards for more photos.  In the numerous trips I’ve taken before and after my Venetian adventure, I’ve never come close to that limit.  In Venice, I had to download photos several times.

It was from the Rialto Bridge, looking at the centuries-old buildings along the Grand Canal in the golden light of a fading day, when the wonder of Venice was really driven home.  And when the memory cards of my camera began to fill.

Taking a Vaporetto to Parts Unknown: Having successfully found the Rialto Bridge, I decided to wander farther afield.  I hopped a vaporetto without checking the route map, trusting it to take me to a place that I would find delightful.

Automotive manufacturers suggest that a car is a route to freedom.  In the rural countryside, they may be right.  But in a city, a car is an anchor.  Between sitting in traffic, circling in a search of parking, and taking a second mortgage to pay the parking tab, a car doesn’t provide much freedom.

Instead, hopping aboard transit to parts unknown, letting serendipity take hold, is the ultimate urban freedom.  Especially when the travel is accompanied by the gentle slap of waves on a hull.

And sometimes it also leads to great photos.

I found myself near the southern tip of the island, a neighborhood that I would later explore more fully.  But for tonight, I stayed along the water, following a broad walkway looking across the Guidecca Channel toward Guidecca Island and the San Giorgio Maggiore Church, a structure which had played a key role in the history of architecture and which I would also later visit.

On the landside as I walked was a tall fence, covered in jasmine that was fully in bloom.  I’m not always scent-oriented, but this evening the jasmine was an essential part of the scene.

As the light turned increasingly golden, I found the photo that remains my favorite from the entire trip.  Looking across the light chop of the channel at the church steeple, with navigation pylons in the foreground marked with lights that looked as if they’d been stolen from a London street, it wasn’t the quintessential Venetian scene, but it captured the magic of Venice for me.  I can’t smell jasmine without thinking of the setting.

My exploring quotient complete for the day, I returned to my home neighborhood, found a trattoria on the Campo San Polo, and had a frutte di mare pizza with a beer, happy with my first day in Venice.

The next day, I’d begin to explore in earnest.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Venice 2007: Finding My New Front Door and Bumping My Head

For a holiday respite, my Friday posts through December and into January will tell of a trip I took to Venice in 2007.  I’ll use photos from the trip and notes that I took at the time.  I’ll highlight the urbanist issues of day-to-day living in perhaps the most famous car-free city in the world.

In my first two posts, I managed to reach Marco Polo Airport and then Piazza San Marco.  (I promise that the pace of the narrative arc will soon improve, although not today.)  When the last post ended, I was about to embark on the first vaporetto voyage of my trip.  Now that I was on the ground in Venice, I thought I was nearly home, but a few more missteps awaited me.

Vaporetti: A quick explanation on the vaporetti system.  A vaporetto is a water bus, with a capacity of more than a hundred people.  Other than walking, a vaporetto is the only way around Venice for people who don’t own their own boats or don’t want to spend 60 euros on a water taxi.   The vaporetti are noisy and clumsy, cutting a wide swath through the major waterways, but Venice can’t function without them.

There are also gondolas in Venice, but they’re a clichéd tourist device.  Gondolas are to Venetian transit what the hansom cabs of Central Park are to New York City transit.

During my time in Venice, I likely took more than a hundred vaporetto trips.

The 82 vaporetto runs up and down the Grand Canal and is the backbone of the vaporetti system.  With two week’s worth of luggage still slung over my shoulders, I found the stop for the 82, only a short distance from Piazza San Marco.

The 82 soon appeared and I climbed aboard, pleased to have found my way this far.  The attendant asked for my ticket and I proudly offered one of the Venice Cards.  He impatiently explained that I was supposed to have it time-stamped before using it for the first time.  Oops.  I’d missed that point, although it was clearly stated.

The attendant looked at my luggage, sighed deeply, and noted the time on the back of the ticket.  Oddly, during my two-week stay, it was the only time I was asked for my card.  My luggage must have made me look like a newbie.

Wayfinding: I had no problem finding the right stop at which to leave the vaporetto, but stumbled in my first effort at street navigation.  Most Venetian maps are quite good.  The problem is that minds trained in American wayfinding rebel against some of the information.  Secondo Calle de Sangre Cristo can’t be a three-foot passage past the service door of a restaurant, but it is.  Plaza de Santa Maria de Visitazione can’t be a ten-foot square of pavement on the bank of a canal, but it is.

Once I learned to take the map literally and to quit applying an American sense of values to places and names, I was fine.  But that learning took several days.  For now, I was wandering with luggage on increasing weary shoulders thinking that Calle dei Saoneri couldn’t possibly be that tight alley packed with shoppers, but it was.

Making an Introduction: Arriving finally at the front door of the building that housed my apartment, having taken twenty minutes for a journey that I would soon learn to do in five, I pressed the bell.  My landlord had told me that his 82-year-old mother would be waiting for me in my apartment on the fourth floor.  (Quick note on counting floors: Venice is consistent with the European convention that the first floor is the one above the ground floor.  So, my fourth floor walkup apartment in Venice would be a fifth floor walkup apartment in the U. S.)

No answer came to the first press of the bell, so I pressed again, this time for both Signora Manera’s apartment and my own.  Still nothing.  I looked for a way to squeeze myself into the doorway to avoid the growing crush of shoppers around me.  I also considered the possibility that Signora Manera was away, forcing me to while away time on the streets, luggage still in hand.

But then I looked up.  An elderly woman was looking down from a window high up on the building.  "Ah, Signora Manera.  My name is Dave Alden.  I am renting the apartment from your son Bruno.”  No response.  No shake of the head, no returning questions.  Nothing, but a look of total indifference.

I tried again, varying my text to include my few words of Italian. “Prego.”  “Grazie.”  “Scusi.”  Still nothing.  Then I remembered that I was wearing a ballcap.  Being outside, it wasn’t inappropriate, but perhaps I was dealing with a woman of old world sensibilities, so I removed it.  With a curt nod, Signora Manera pulled her head in.  A moment later the buzzer sounded.

I met Signora Manera at her third floor apartment.  We tried to exchange pleasantries, but found the language barrier insurmountable.  Nonetheless, I clearly understood that she wanted me to watch my head as we climbed to my apartment.

Settling In and Stooping Over:  The apartment was a lovely space.  Hardware floors.  Exposed beams that I later learned were more than five centuries old, a fact that still astounds me.  Modern and stylish Italian plumbing.  Granite countertops and bathroom walls.  Old world structural details.  And plenty of room.  For a family of midgets.

The apartment exceeded a thousand square of floor space.  Of which less than two hundred had headroom of six feet or more.  There was the kitchen.  There was a small area in the bathroom, but not the tub.  And there was the dressing area of the bedroom.  Otherwise, I spent my apartment time scuttling like a crab.

I didn’t always wear a ballcap when on the streets of Venice, but it is de rigueur within the apartment.  I found it easier to pluck 500-year-old wood fibers from the cap than from my forehead.  I removed the cap to sleep, but when I looked at the beam only twelve inches above my head, I questioned even that decision.

 

But for all the height restrictions, the apartment has two great points in its favor.  First, the price was right.  Second, and more importantly, it was in Venice.  I awoke every day, once I arose from my mattress on the floor, to a view of red-tile Venetian roofs.  Six years later, the memory still brings forth goose bumps.

Next time, I finally begin exploring.  And quickly take my favorite photo of the trip.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)