Reason Magazine - Staff

Neither Gods Nor Goo

info@reason.com (Todd Seavey) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

By the middle of the century, the inventor Ray Kurzweil suggests in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, human beings will live in perpetual clouds of nanobots, molecule-sized robots that spend each moment altering our micro-environments to our precise preferences. Over the longer term, he imagines that nanotechnology—the manipulation of matter at the molecular level—will let us change our shape and appearance, become immortal, and transfer our minds with ease between far-flung planets.

By contrast, the thriller writer Michael Crichton describes nanobots running amok in his 2002 novel Prey. With his signature mix of tech savvy and paranoia, Crichton imagines the tiny automatons forming “nanoswarms,” clouds that visually mimic human beings in order to infiltrate and destroy us—sort of microscopic, sentient super-kudzu.

Both our hopes and fears regarding nanotechnology have been extreme from the beginning, if we take as the beginning K. Eric Drexler’s 1986 book Engines of Creation. Drexler, an engineer, described nanotech as the ultimate fulfillment of humanity’s dynamic, self-transforming tendencies: the ability to create whatever we want, whenever we want it, combined with an imperative to take this godlike new power to the stars and turn the universe into our playground. Drexler also described the dark twin of this vision: the “gray goo” scenario. Self-replicating nanobots, which proliferate by turning surrounding matter into copies of themselves, would go out of control, turning the entire Earth into themselves—the most homogeneous imaginable version of the apocalypse. In the words of a technophilic but precaution-prone acquaintance of mine, a computer programmer who has his wristwatch set to alert him if a tsunami approaches Manhattan: “The gray goo scenario should at least give one pause.”

Such disaster fears are already fueling calls for regulation, even with the technology barely out of the cradle. Nanotech-related products will soon account for $2.6 trillion in sales each year, according to a London School of Business/Rice University study. The current applications are concentrated in products that benefit from highly efficient filtering or surface-application processes, such as microchips, car wax, and sunscreen. But down the road, the likely applications include molecule-perfect wound-healing, flawless cleaning processes, quantum computing, far easier bioengineering, much more efficient photon and electrical transfer, and much more. In a June 2007 press release, Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, noted that nanotechnology “promises to be the most important innovation since electricity and the internal combustion engine.” At the same time, it called for more testing and oversight, warning that some nanotech applications “might pose substantial risks to human health and the environment.”

Although Consumers Union concedes that “no confirmed cases of harm to humans from manufactured nanoparticles have been reported,” it adds that “there is cause for concern based on several worrisome findings from the limited laboratory and animal research so far.” It worries that particles that are nontoxic at normal sizes may become toxic when nanosized; that these nanoparticles, which are already present in cosmetics and food, can more easily “enter the body and its vital organs, including the brain,” than normal particles; and that nanomaterials will linger longer in the environment. All of this really comes down to pointing out that some particles are smaller than others. Size is not a reliable indicator of potential harm to human beings, and nature itself is filled with nanoparticles. But the default assumption of danger from the new is palpable.

Anti-nanotech sentiment has not been restricted to Consumers Union’s relatively short list of concerns. In France, groups of hundreds of protesters have rallied against even such benign manifestations of the technology as the carbon nanotubules that allow Parkinson’s sufferers to stop tremors by directing medicine to their own brains. In England members of a group called THRONG (The Heavenly Righteous Opposed to Nanotech Greed) have disrupted nanotech business conferences dressed as angels. In 2005 naked protesters appeared in front of an Eddie Bauer store in Chicago to condemn one of the more visible uses of nanotech: stain-resistant pants.

These nanopants employ billions of tiny whiskers to create a layer of air above the rest of the fabric, causing liquids to roll off easily. It’s not quite what Kurzweil and Crichton had in mind, nor is it “little robots in your pants,” as CNN put it. But nanotechnology arguably embraces any item that incorporates engineering at the molecular level, including mundane products like this one.

Just as the nano label can be broadly applied to products for branding and attention-grabbing purposes, so too can critics use the label to condemn barely related developments by linking them to the (still hypothetical) problems of nanopollution and gray goo. But there’s a danger in thinking of nanotech only in god-or-goo terms. People at both extremes of the controversy fail to appreciate the humble, incremental, yet encouraging progress that nanotech researchers are making. And focusing on dramatic visions of nanotech heaven or hell may foster restrictions that delay or block innovations that can extend and improve our lives.

In a Small Country
To get a look at some of the real nanotech re-search, neither divine nor gooey, I went on a junket to one nanotech hotspot, visiting researchers in Glasgow, Dundee, and Edinburgh. (Scottish Enterprise, a public-private economic development agency that promotes international awareness of such researchers and other Scottish ventures, paid for the trip.) I also made a quick visit to the Edinburgh grave of Adam Smith, a reminder that the Scots are proudly, even pugnaciously, entrepreneurial and inventive—“punching above our weight,” as many people in that nation of only 5 million like to put it before rattling off a list of the famous inventors who have come from Scotland.

One of those famous Scots was the 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Today, thanks to nanotech, one of his countrymen may be on the verge of creating a workable version of a system that Maxwell first imagined. “It’s a little bit frustrating when people talk about nanobots and gray goo, because it’s not as exciting as what we’re really going to be able to do,” says Edinburgh University chemist David A. Leigh. Leigh believes nanotech might allow us to create a system physicists call Maxwell’s Demon. With virtually no expenditure of energy, it could sort all the warmer particles of gas in a chamber to one side and all the cold particles to the other. It would be almost like getting heat from thin air, an immense source of energy at virtually no cost. Maxwell recognized that such a process would border on violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states, in essence, that entropy wins in the end, that things tend not to assume a more complex, orderly form unless energy is added to them. Since filtering—a far cry from robotically conquering the world—is what nanoparticles currently do best, Maxwell’s Demon is not such a far-fetched application.

In the meantime, Leigh contents himself with miracles like making water droplets run uphill, thanks to tiny, twisting “motors” created by simple chemical reactions between a few atoms. Similarly, the Livingston-based company Memsstar is creating more efficient surfaces for industrial coatings and wafers by, for instance, finding ways to keep them dry with microscopic gyroscopes. Leigh recognizes that this is “complete sci-fi stuff,” but he suggests it’s a wonder we haven’t made more use of such processes before. “Nature uses molecular machines to do everything…every single biological process,” he says. “We used controlled molecular motion for nothing. Nature isn’t using it for nothing. When mankind learns to make molecular machines, it’s going to change everything.” He expects that revolution within a decade.

Being able to design surfaces at the molecular level increasingly means being able to alter them on cue at the molecular level. “You can make surfaces that change their properties, so you can drag objects toward you just using light,” says Leigh. “One day, you might walk into your house to find that the kids have made some big mess, and you just turn on some lasers that put everything back in place.” After years of using nanotech for micro-level processes such as more efficiently sorting chemicals, Leigh says, his water droplet stunt “showed that you could use microscopic machines to do things in the real world, the big world.”

The staff of Leigh’s Edinburgh lab, perhaps as a reminder to remain humble, has put up a poster of actor/singer David Hasselhoff that reads, “ ‘I tried to save the world and I forgot to save myself.’ —The Hoff.” Leigh is mindful that for all our fantasies of transforming the outside world, our own bodies are an important locus of nanotech potential. “Nature carries cargo throughout the cells using molecular machines,” he says, and that opens up all sorts of possibilities for manipulating the system.

Pumping Ion
Medical uses offer some of the most immediate benefits of improved molecular manipulation. Adam Curtiss, a professor of cell biology at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Cell Engineering, has shown that by restructuring molecules on the surface of stem cells—just altering the roughness of the surface, without making chemical or biological changes—scientists can determine what sort of tissue the cells will grow into. Scott Wilson, a senior project manager with Scottish Enterprise, enthuses that nanotech may soon allow the easy transfer of signals between wires and nerves. That could be useful in many cybernetic and medical devices, such as more versatile prostheses. A step farther removed from the human body, ArrayJet, a company based in the Midlothian town of Dalkeith, is quietly improving the quality of scientists’ microscope slides by using inkjet-like technology to place samples on them with unprecedented accuracy. Meanwhile, the Intermediary Technology Institutes in Glasgow, taking a page from the comic book character Wolverine with his adamantium-plated skeleton, are studying potential reinforcement coatings for osteoporosis-ravaged bones.

In the past people were content simply to imagine such things, says Brendan Casey, chief executive of the Glasgow-based company Kelvin Nanotechnologies, but now “people expect delivery.” Delivery, in the case of Casey’s company, means fabricating materials in an ultramodern, stray-particle-free “clean room” in an old Victorian building at the University of Glasgow (where, Casey says, you become very adept at recognizing people in their jumpsuits and hoods). Sometimes clients know precisely what materials they need, he says, while other times they’ll say, “I’m not even sure if this is possible, but can you do this for me?”

Kelvin Nanotechnologies has been involved in research on so-called “labs on a pill” and “labs on a chip,” tiny chemical diagnostic and medicine-delivery devices within the body that eliminate such macroscopic clumsiness as time-release capsules, lengthy probes, and the need for many medicines to travel through the entire bloodstream. They employ precise fits between target cells and injected substances that Casey describes as “molecular Lego.” The ability to sort substances at the molecular level has applications from water flow in nine-inch pipes to fiber-optic cables. It also will likely mean the ability to regrow injured tendons along grooves created by nanomaterial within the body that melt away after use.

At the University of St. Andrews, the scientists of the Biophotonics Programme, aided by the fact that sufficiently small particles can be manipulated by light, are working with lasers as optical tweezers—the “ultimate sterile instrument,” one researcher calls them. Such instruments could decrease the odds of hospital infections by moving cells and microscopic dollops of medicine without the need for contact between flesh and solid instruments. Sufficiently fine-tuned tweezing, of a sort impossible with larger tools made from metal, may make it possible to deactivate tumors by identifying and destroying their stem cells. St. Andrews physicist Kishan Dholakia has high hopes for using molecular sorting and lasers to make more diagnoses at the chemical level rather than through patient observation.

Rather than looking at macroscopic phenomena, doctors of the future may be able to tag, track, and observe the cellular-level damage that is causing problems, whether it’s a perforated spleen or a misfiring nerve in the lower back. If that sounds too distant and speculative, St. Andrews researchers are already working with light-activated creams that speed wound healing and are less likely to leave scars than conventional bandages and stitches.

Defense of Mechanisms
Wonderful as all this is, it is gradual and piecemeal—not as frightening, terrible, or transformative as either the sci-fi optimists or the doomsaying activists would have it. And that makes it all the more ridiculous that such valuable work might be impeded by regulations or protests motivated by mostly imaginary or far-off scenarios. One reason the Scots are so optimistic about their potential to be big players in nanotech is their belief that wariness about cloning and stem cell research in the U.S. and a general aversion to biotechnology in continental Europe do not bode well for nanotech research in those places.

Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, along with various European green groups, have called for a moratorium on nanotech until it can be proven safe. At their urging, the European Commission last year began to consider whether nanotech fits under existing E.U. safety regulations or must be subjected to special reviews and controls. This sort of legal limbo tends to inhibit investment.

In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regards nanotech as a “combination product” that bridges the divide between pharmaceuticals, biological agents, and medical devices. That means nanotech must be proven safe and effective before approval and may risk being shuttled between different offices, but is not as yet presumed especially dangerous. The FDA concedes it has no regulatory authority over nondrug, nonfood products such as nanotech-incorporating cosmetics, a frequent target of unscientific health scares. It would not be surprising if the FDA eventually invites discussion of whether to expand its regulatory authority to cover nanotech uses currently outside its bailiwick or cedes such regulatory responsibility to other agencies. In 2006 the Berkeley City Council, often in the vanguard of green regulations, became the first U.S. locality to explicitly require tracking of production processes involving nanoparticles.

While nanotech has not yet attracted as much ire as biotech, nanotech researchers are worried by the negative tone of much of the press coverage biotech receives. Shortly before my visit to Scotland, the Roslin Research Institute—a source of Midlothian pride 11 years ago when it unveiled the cloned sheep Dolly—declined to participate in a BBC special about biotech because it was clear the show would take a “Frankenstein unleashed” approach, according to Harry Griffin, the institute’s former science director and CEO. I saw an ad for the broadcast, an episode of the BBC series Animal Farm, while I was in Scotland. In the sort of overt appeal to ignorance that has become the norm in media coverage of biotechnology, it suggested that what viewers don’t know about high-tech animal husbandry should be cause for alarm.

Among those making a conscious effort to stave off similar paranoia about nanotech are Richard Moore and Ottilia Saxl of the Institute of Nanotechnology in Stirling. Moore laments green activists’ “tendency to consider any of the risks and not the benefits.” He likens the recklessness of being overcautious about nanotechnology to regulators’ longtime resistance to portable defibrillators, once feared because of their potential misuse in inexpert hands but now so valued in the U.K. that they are routinely carried on garbage trucks and kept in other widespread places to make their rapid deployment possible. “There’s no medical device that’s free of risk,” he notes.

Suppose “you’ve got a disseminated brain tumor, and you’re offered nanoparticles or you’ve got three weeks to live,” says Saxl. “If you can actually minutely target these nanoparticles at the tumor, what a wonderful thing.” She has helped organize awareness-raising conferences on “bioinspired nanotechnologies” and nanotech’s environmental benefits (such as radically more efficient oil spill cleanups) because the sense that nanotech is “unnatural” could make it the next target of green or Luddite revulsion. “Lipids and other natural substances can be called nanoparticles,” she notes, “but companies didn’t want to call their work nanotechnology.”

Moore adds that people tend to assume that “natural” things are safe and that the products of industry are automatically a cause for concern. “We’re talking about manmade nanoparticles,” he says, “but we’ve had natural nanoparticles for centuries”—from volcanoes and other natural sources, spewed far and wide—with little concern except among those directly in the blast zone.

No Pants, No Implants
In the U.S., despite our flirtation with paranoia about biotech and our routine panics over pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals, our resilient gee-whiz attitude toward machines may yet make our country a haven for unbounded nanotech. But we will have to be watchful of those who seek to smother it as a potential monster long before it has had a chance to yield anything remotely resembling the dreams of the optimists or the nightmares of the detractors.

Given people’s instinctive unease about strange things entering their bodies, we may be better off if the American public becomes enamored of relatively trivial nanotech applications, such as the now-omnipresent stain-resistant pants, before taking much notice of the far more beneficial medical uses. Biotech endures in the U.S. largely because people are accustomed to seeing it used in corn, soybeans, wheat, and other staples of the food supply before opponents had really spread their message. Similarly, we may find that a nation long accustomed to unnaturally clean pants is more receptive to nano-based treatments for cancer and Parkinson’s.

Today’s researchers can only dream of someday possessing the technology to make self-construction by nanobots more efficient than a macroscopic process for making nanobots. Only then could they begin to dream of making the self-construction process propagate itself so rapidly that it constituted a widening menace. Worrying at this stage about the theoretical potential for nanotech to destroy the world—or to transform us into shape-shifting gods—is a bit like worrying that if we engage in laser research we might someday create a laser weapon so powerful that it could destroy the entire planet. There’s a long way between here and there, and those distant prospects should not cause us to hobble people taking tiny steps in far more benign directions.

Todd Seavey edits HealthFactsAndFears.com for the American Council on Science and Health and blogs at ToddSeavey.com.

Art Deco at Ground Zero

info@reason.com (Todd Seavey) — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 05:51:00 EST

Art Deco, Ground Zero

info@reason.com (Todd Seavey) — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 10:28:00 EDT

When Mohammed Atta flew the first plane into the World Trade Center five years ago, he was not only a terrorist striking a blow against America but a former architecture student striking a blow against the mid-twentieth-century building style called modernism.

We'll never know if that thought crossed his mind in his final moments, but it wouldn't have been the first time terrorists saw modernist architecture as a weird imperialist imposition—one often characterized by geometric shapes, cold glass and steel, Louis Sullivan's minimalist principle that "form follows function," and early modernist Adolf Loos' more puritanical rule that "Ornament is crime." In 1997, Basque separatists expressed a special hatred for Frank Gehry's Spanish branch of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, which looks something like a giant titanium cabbage, by threatening to blow it up. Ostentatious, gaudy-modern sites indicative of creeping modernity—such as a Planet Hollywood restaurant bombed by Muslim terrorists in Capetown, South Africa in 1998—have been criticized from a variety of traditionalist and leftist perspectives for running roughshod over local customs and aesthetics. And not all the critics are insane.

When the World Trade Center was completed in 1973, it was part of the late phase of an architectural revolution, and not an altogether pretty one. Modernism explicitly rejected the past, but now would be the perfect time to relearn some of the lessons that were lost in the process, so that something can be built at Ground Zero that is elegant in the most timeless sense of the word, elegant in the way that the Woolworth Building, mere blocks from the Trade Center site, is—and in the way that many buildings from the first, all too brief generation of skyscrapers were a century ago, before modernism declared ornament, decoration, gentle curves, and playful details to be frivolous.

Tom Wolfe summed up the case against modernist architecture in his book From Bauhaus to Our House, explaining how the European modernists of the early twentieth century consciously cast tradition aside, believing they could create not just buildings but aesthetics and cities themselves according to simple rational principles—with the results often being cold, ugly, inhuman, and even impractical. (Modernist buildings, with their flat roofs and massive facades, were often leakier and windier than expected.)

Archmodernist Le Corbusier wrote maniacal diatribes against traditional aesthetics, calling old, organically developed towns "things that have merely happened" rather than being planned, fit only for meandering "pack donkeys." He dreamed of razing all of Paris' old buildings in order to replace them with his now all-too-familiar trademark concrete public housing blocks. When an early critic of Le Corbusier called him boring, he dismissively responded: "that doctrine [that my critics follow] 'Life'; life with its many facets and unending variety; life, two-faced or four-faced, putrescent or healthy, limpid or muddy; the exact and the arbitrary, logic and illogicality, the good God and the good Devil; everything in confusion; pour it all in, stir well and serve hot and label the pot 'Life.' That should be enough to make any living being a many-sided character of infinite variety." This, I must stress, was Le Corbusier's description of evil.

We still live every day surrounded by the dehumanizing results of the philosophy of Le Corbusier and his ilk. Take the odd little planned community called Roosevelt Island off Manhattan's eastern shore, peopled by an odd mix of U.N. employees, hospital staffers, and (by explicit demographic design) a certain number of low-income residents. Combining the dreariness of Le Corbusier and the hopelessness of Asbury Park, NJ, the island's Main Street is a narrow, modernist canyon with Pompidou Center-like orange ducts at one end. Styleless red signs line Main Street, with sterile, artless names all rendered (by law) in the same font: Thrift Shop, Community Library, Fish Store, Cocktail Lounge, General Store, Travel Agency/Bakery, Public Safety Dept., Parish Chapel, Island Management Office. One former Roosevelt Island resident I spoke to told me that Roosevelt Island reminds her of living in Romania as a child: "During the Ceausescu regime, they demolished certain cultural and religious buildings, and they were building a huge number of buildings that were all modernist—no uniqueness, just very sterile—to house the workers in the big factories."

Across the river, on the eastern shore of Manhattan, two other apartment complexes, Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town, built in the mid-twentieth century, are also homogeneous in a typically modernist way. "From the outside, it just looks like a big block of buildings that all look the same," one long-time Stuyvesant resident told me. "It never occurred to me that it looked ugly or not ugly. It just was there." As one Peter Cooper resident said, "They're purely functional... If you want a building with personality, that should also mean you have a building where your door closes differently than your neighbor's and there are little quirks in the individual apartments, and there really aren't here."

And the sad truth is that the World Trade Center, while ostensibly an icon of a hectic and diverse world of ever-changing commerce, was also a bland modernist structure—though it certainly didn't deserve its horrible fate. It was the sort of mass-produced-looking artifact that convinced countless leftists in mid-century that capitalist society was all about conformity and rigidity, when in truth it was anything but.

***

Before modernism, buildings had a richer, more ornate, and more varied look.

Anyone who has watched people hesitate when faced with an unadorned glass door placed in the middle of an unadorned glass wall—as Boston architect David Whitney did one day on a visit to the New York City Guggenheim Museum—will understand that there is something blank and inhuman about modernism. Cornices, wainscoting, door frames, decorations, and other psychologically comforting, traditional cues were useful for guiding living, breathing human beings through what might otherwise be a geometer's bland maze. Whitney explained to me that some architects eventually embraced criticisms such as Tom Wolfe's—architects such as Robert Venturi, whose laudatory book Learning from Las Vegas was one of the first signs of a post-modernist movement, intended to revive a spirit of playfulness and warmth in building.

The postmodernists of the late twentieth century did not want to deny history but instead to resurrect it in bits and pieces, borrowing Roman columns here (as architect Ricardo Bofill has) or Art Nouveau decorative flourishes there (as seen on Thomas Beeby's wacky and eclectic Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago). Postmodern architect Robert A.M. Stern explicitly described the method as a partial return to traditionalism. Postmodern planners Andre Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk have won acclaim for applying postmodernism's insights to urban planning, encouraging simpler, more flexible building codes in an effort to move away from homogeneity while still retaining a certain thematic consistency similar to the organic towns of old, resulting in complexes that look a bit like a pleasant cross between sleek late-twentieth-century Miami and Victorian New England.

Of course, postmodernism can sometimes be as garish as modernism is bland. While researching some of Venturi's works, I talked to some disgruntled New Haven firefighters who work in an oddly-shaped firehouse that the premier postmodernist designed. "We're rebuilding the whole thing and we're not telling any architects about it, so we can get it right," Chief Martin O'Connor told me. Lt. John King added, "I think the gentleman's smart never to show up here in person."

Still, postmodernism's exuberance was a welcome change after modernism. Can we learn from that tension and build something at Ground Zero in southern Manhattan—after five years of public-private, bipartisan, bureaucratic inactivity—that avoids both modernist drabness and postmodern frivolity? The current plan—if this one actually comes to fruition—appears to be little more than warmed-over modernism, a sort of shiny-white futurist complex that looks as though it may have come from Krypton, topped by a 1,776-foot spire meant to represent the American Founding, though you'd never know it (Jeffersonian neoclassicism might do more to evoke the Founding era, but there's little chance of anything emerging from the current squabbling that looks as good as Monticello).

It would be nice if the planners of Ground Zero's reconstruction adopted the attitude that has become more common among architects in recent years: humbly pick the style that's "right for the job" and then adhere to its rules with some deference to that style's internal, traditional rules. As Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman says, we want buildings to please their users, not help architects make a philosophical point—a self-indulgent tendency in twentieth-century architecture that reached its reductio ad absurdum with the so-called deconstructionist architects, who deliberately designed buildings that no one would want to live in. (One such architect suggested a replacement design for the Trade Center that would have looked like the original complex in mid-collapse.) "This is a pluralistic time," says Tigerman, "a pluralistic society, and instead of saying 'What will buildings be like?', I will do my best to cause Humpty Dumpty to be put back together again, which is denying deconstruction."

Architect David R. Hall of Mt. Vernon, WA, says, "We're really going through a renaissance of modernism now, but a more humanized modernism." That means, among other things, accepting the use of ornament where necessary, thinking about what colors will look warm and inviting instead of machine-like, and taking greater account of customer preferences for light and space. Ultimately, the biggest change in attitude among architects in recent years, though, is the view that one should employ past styles as a sort of palette rather than ignoring them, referencing them ironically, or rigidly replicating them. In any case, precisely imitating the past isn't so easy. Interior designer Julia Busby, of the architecture firm Jova, Daniels & Busby, in addition to describing various successful designs from her firm, pointed out to me how her co-workers didn't quite match the look of Atlanta's old city hall when they built the new addition. "I think the intention was let's pick a color that will fade and age with the city hall, but again, city hall was stone and new city hall is stucco. It blends, but I think the glass got a little too green."

Is there, though, some relatively recent and recoverable style, natural and organic for New York City, that would simultaneously be rooted in the city's past and boldly evocative of an optimism about the future? Chicago managed to forge a distinctive style—and invent the skyscraper in the process—when it rebuilt after a devastating fire in the late nineteenth century, creating buildings that are fancy and ornate in an old-fashioned way while being intensely vertical engineering marvels at the same time. Is there a style that can do for New York what Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham did for Chicago when they raised it from the ashes?

The past century of architectural history is enough to make one cautious about grand pronouncements and city-sized planning, but as a New Yorker, I must say I wouldn't mind seeing something rise at Ground Zero that looked less like Krypton and a good deal more like Art Deco, the style that gave New York City three of its other most spectacular building sites: the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, and perhaps most beautifully of all, the Chrysler Building, with its gargoyle-sized Chrysler hood ornaments that link the grandeur of gothic cathedrals to the future of American manufacturing without irony or apology. Art Deco, with its chrome, spires, lightning bolts, and Fred Astaire-era class, manages to respect traditional notions of beauty while making one want to leap into the future with the confidence of Flash Gordon—a future that flowed gracefully from the past instead of being a brutal break with the past. Art Deco was the product of a civilization that was prosperous, proud, eclectic, and fun—not one so worried about giving offense or invoking the wrong tradition that it would rather make heartless boxes.

Maybe it would be naïve to try going back to Art Deco, but something like it would tell the world, all in one go, that we're still New York, still Western civilization, still dynamic, and still building—not merely recovering.

Regulation for Dummies

info@reason.com (Todd Seavey) — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 00:00:00 EST

The Killer Fog

info@reason.com (Todd Seavey) — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 00:00:00 EST

The Potato Whisperer

info@reason.com (Todd Seavey) — Fri, 01 Feb 2002 00:00:00 EST

Erogenous Zones

info@reason.com (Todd Seavey) — Sat, 01 Mar 1997 00:00:00 EST

The replacement of the traditional marquee messages on New York City's 42nd Street with off-putting, sometimes shocking, slogans happened quickly. Where a world-famous walkway of sexual entertainment had once promised "Peep Shows!," "Lesbian, Bondage, European," and "All Nude All the Time," a disconcerting wave of government-sponsored modern-art phrases began to appear. "Is this true or only clever?" asked one. Another said, "All art is either revolution or plagiarism." The slogans graced the otherwise barren fronts of buildings the city government had bought or condemned.

This was the most visible manifestation of the city's ongoing effort to eliminate most of the adult entertainment outlets near Times Square--establishments such as Courageous Books, Peep O Rama, and the Adult Entertainment Shopping Center--and create a more family-friendly area for hotels and mainstream theaters, encouraging new investment. Already, a children's theater has opened on what was once the 42nd Street walk of porn.

Severe restrictions on New York City's remaining adult video stores, book shops, movie theaters, peep shows, strip clubs, and topless bars were scheduled to take effect on October 25. A state Supreme Court justice rejected a constitutional challenge on October 23, but implementation of the rules was delayed pending appeal. Under the ordinance, which the City Council approved by a 41-9 vote in October 1995, adult entertainment establishments are largely banished to outer boroughs, waterfronts, and commercial zones. They are not allowed to operate within 500 feet of each other or within 500 feet of schools, places of worship, or residential areas. The city predicts that fewer than 30 of 177 known sexual entertainment outlets in New York will be permitted to remain at their current locations. That means closing or moving more than 80 percent of the businesses.

For purposes of regulation, the law defines pornography (in part) as visual materials or live performers displaying any of the following: human genitals during sex or in a state of arousal; "actual or simulated acts of masturbation, intercourse, or sodomy"; or "specified anatomical areas," including "human male genitals in a discernibly turgid state, even if completely and opaquely concealed." A video or book store with more than 40 percent of its stock devoted to such material qualifies as an adult entertainment establishment. The rules would not affect mainstream entertainment stores with small porn sections, such as the new Virgin Megastore at Broadway and 45th Street (despite its suggestive name). The ordinance follows the state's definition of strip clubs and topless bars, based on the degree of undress and the proximity of performers to customers.

The owners of these businesses are not taking the city's edict lying down. Seventy- seven of them have hired Manhattan lawyer Herald Price Fahringer to challenge the ordinance on First Amendment grounds. Fahringer asks, "If somebody said we want to do all this [redevelopment], but we don't like all these kung fu movies and violent films--how large a step is it?" Norman Siegel, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, is also challenging the law. He represents Rachel Hickerson, a member of Feminists for Free Expression who is suing as a consumer of pornography. (She goes to strip clubs and watches adult videos.) Fahringer and Siegel emphasize that the fare offered by businesses such as Peepland Adult Center and Dangerous Curves is constitutionally protected. While the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld bans on "obscenity," in a city like New York little or nothing falls into that category, which is defined according to community standards.

Although the city may not impose an outright ban on adult entertainment, the Supreme Court has upheld zoning restrictions on such businesses, so long as the rules are not prohibitive. The challenges mounted by Fahringer and Siegel therefore hinge largely on issues such as the costs borne by businesses forced to move and the feasibility of the alternative locations permitted by the city. "They've said, You go to the piers, the wetlands in Staten Island, the outer reaches of Queens and Brooklyn," complains Fahringer. He says some of the areas designated for adult establishments have "no roads and no sidewalks," which means that merchants who rent their current spaces might have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for construction if they relocated. "The Supreme Court has held that you've got to make reasonable accommodations," Fahringer notes. "That's an important issue that I think we should ultimately prevail on."

Siegel concedes that zoning restrictions have been upheld before, but he argues that "the new regulations are more repressive, more restrictive. We think the previous decisions were wrongly decided, but even if they weren't the new rules are unconstitutional." The city is relying largely on the 1989 New York State Court of Appeals decision Town of Islip v. Caviglia, which allowed the town to restrict the growth of red-light districts without banning them. "In that case, though, all the existing businesses survived," notes Siegel. "In our case, most of them wouldn't."

Some residents of neighborhoods where displaced porn outlets will be allowed to relocate are not happy with the plan either. In one Chinese neighborhood in Brooklyn, there has been talk of combating an encroaching sex zone by opening more churches, making the creation of new adult entertainment establishments geographically impossible. Some of the boroughs likely to see an influx of fugitive sex shops have already fought local porn battles. In Brooklyn, the nude dance club Steam Heat has been at the center of a protracted building permit dispute, and in Queens protesters have sought to curb the spread of clubs such as Wiggles and Naked City.

Times Square, on the other hand, has been a red-light district since the Depression era, when Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia fought to shut down a small empire of burlesque houses run by Bill Minsky. There is little pretense that the new rules are aimed at preserving a cozy residential neighborhood in Times Square. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who has long promoted the porn restrictions, is eager to make parts of New York City more attractive to major businesses, whether by shutting down street vendors and flea markets, intervening in neighborhood disputes over the opening of big chain stores, or seizing control of mob-influenced truck unloading operations at the Fulton Fish Market. The porn re-zoning puts Giuliani squarely on the side of big investors such as Disney, which has already renovated the large New Amsterdam Theater near Times Square, and against another industry with mob ties and an unwholesome reputation.

Al Goldstein, editor of Screw magazine, sees the new regulations as yet another assault in the war against sexual expression. Goldstein was recently involved in a porn- defending lawsuit himself, arguing along with stripper and TV host Robin Byrd that the adult programming on Manhattan's "commercial use" cable channel should not be scrambled. "New York will always be a Neanderthal [place] because politicians are at the helm here," he says. "Politicians run the city, and they're whores. They give real prostitutes a bad name." Goldstein doesn't expect anything momentous to happen as a result of the ongoing court battles over the new rules. Instead, he sees the dispute as a footnote to an age-old social struggle. "Remember, the Puritans left England and came to America," he says. "We're a sex-hating, body-hating culture."

But New York politics is rarely as simple as free speech vs. prudery. The city routinely uses land-use regulations to favor certain interests over others, and many quieter zoning battles go largely unnoticed. At the same time that the porn restrictions were making news, for instance, a struggle was going on over whether to re-zone Eighth Avenue to allow the sale of retail items that require large cardboard boxes. Large cardboard boxes, of course, don't spark the kind of First Amendment debates that porn does.

Walter McCaffrey, one of the City Council members who voted for the new porn rules, says the focus on "secondary impact" problems and the availability of alternative locations for affected businesses should satisfy First Amendment concerns. "Basically," he says, "the quality of life in the area had been jeopardized by a whole host of low-level crimes and a decrease in property values." Gretchen Dykstra, president of the Times Square Business Improvement District, takes a similar position. "If you open a bowling alley," she says, "it doesn't necessarily discourage opening a supermarket next door. Pornography does....If you let the market rule on this issue, you'll see that the pornographers move into areas with depressed property values near transportation hubs....You then destroy the neighborhood." The new rules mean "no neighborhood ever has to become a red-light district," she says. "I think this was crucial to the renovation," the single biggest step toward removing Times Square's "quality of life problems and image problems."

Fahringer, the sex shop lawyer, doesn't buy the quality of life argument. "There's no evidence that the adult establishments result in negative secondary effects," he says. "The city did a study a couple of years ago that showed no rise in crime or decline in real property values." Although the secondary effect studies are ambiguous--adult establishments may simply help worsen the reputations of already declining neighborhoods--most New Yorkers would concede that Eighth Avenue is pretty creepy at night.

But businesses offering sexually explicit entertainment don't have to be loud, intrusive, and offensive to passers-by. Contrast, for instance, the garish, in-your-face facade of Show World Center on Eighth Avenue near 42nd Street with the relatively demure exterior of the Private Eyes strip club around the corner (or, for that matter, the atmosphere at a neighborhood video store or newsstand that happens to sell pornography). Even Goldstein says greater discretion on the part of porn merchants might be a good way to avoid conflicts. "I don't want this stuff forced on people," he says. Right now, parts of Eighth Avenue look like a neon-drenched Las Vegas of porn. Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger has suggested using milder rules to address aesthetic concerns and any low-level crime problems while avoiding the constitutionally shaky route of shutting down porn shops. Existing sign regulations and public nuisance laws could be more strictly enforced to discourage lewd storefront posters or drunken patrons.

Messinger is especially concerned about the possible impact of the ordinance on gay- oriented businesses. Members of the gay activist group Empire State Pride Agenda have criticized the new rules, saying they threaten to shut down businesses that provide condoms and AIDS information in addition to pornography. Although the main intent of the law is to transform red-light districts, not Greenwich Village, New York City's gay community, which saw decades of repressive bar raids, has learned that sweeping laws passed for one purpose can later be selectively enforced for another.

Speaking of unintended consequences, the ordinance could actually be a boon for some porn merchants. Gretchen Dykstra says Richard Basciano, king of Times Square porn and one of Fahringer's clients, is "sitting on a gold mine" because he owns a lot of real estate in the area and stands to benefit from the expected influx of investment. And she thinks Basciano would be happy to see a lower concentration of porn shops. "He doesn't want competition," she says.

Who does? "Personally, I think the best places will survive and the others will go," says John Wilson, manager of the Big Top Lounge, a topless bar on Eighth Avenue. Big Top features a Hug 'n' Squeeze room in which customers can have close encounters with employees, a feature Wilson says is "similar to a '60s slow dance." Wilson is not troubled by the government's desire to limit the proliferation of adult entertainment establishments-- which have increased by more than a third in New York since 1984--but he wishes the city wouldn't drive out established businesses such as his. "Times Square should be the Mecca of New York," he says. "I happen to agree with that, but I think they should grandfather in the places already here."

Most store operators are similarly hoping they can stay put. The owner of Manhattan Video on West 39th Street is contemplating shifting his stock toward female wrestling movies and fetish films that feature activities such as spanking and foot licking. While kinky, such films are not pornographic according to the city's precise anatomical definition.