Ben just came to visit Anne in Moscow and they had a marvelous time together, living the high-life--or at the very least, the slightly-elevated-life-- as compared to the one possible in New Jersey, for a week on the edge of winter. Ben has all the photos from their time together. Wouldn't it be great if he posted a few for everyone to see? One imagines Anne would be excited about that, especially as word on the street is her Grandma has recently acquired a computer. One imagines Grandma W. would be excited, too.
Until such time as Ben deems fit for photo-posting, Anne will entertain you with some pictures she took on her ipod touch, at an excellently-curated photography exhibit put up at the new Museum of Graphic Culture, a municipal museum in a half-Guggenheim, half-warehouse concrete and glass cookie-cutter on Ostozhenka. While this particular building is nothing to write home about, I really like what has happened to the Ostozhenka area in the last few years. Lots of people are crying about the wooden buildings that perished under Baturina's heavy hand, and I feel that, I really do, but the bare fact of the matter is that with the exception of the city's modernist treasures--Dom Narkomfina and Dom Melnikova are both in tatters, the former literally crumbling, just beyond the windows of the American embassy--I suspect Moscow is one of the better-preserved European capitals out there.* This is largely due to inertia. Think East Berlin v. West Berlin vis-a-vis those lovely four or five story apartment houses, which still grace Prenzlauerberg, where local authorities lacked the resources to tear them down and put up something new after the war, but were lost in the West. Capital-poor places don't make way for new construction as often as capital-rich ones. Governments that are both paper-heavy and cash-poor, and thus prime candidates for rampant corruption, make for especially slow change. While Moscow remains paper-heavy and corrupt, it is no longer poor. It's rolling in it. What's sad is not that this new money has been used to put up some very innovative, if obviously exclusive and high-end, housing stock between Ostozhenka and the river. What's sad is that so little of this money--because there was more than enough to do both, and still is, despite the 'krizis'-- has been used for capital improvements to keep the city thriving for the next few decades.
But I believe I was going to post some photos.
*This is all the more true when one takes into account the historic building materials to which Muscovites have had access over the centuries. I was tooling around my neighborhood this morning near an old church that has just re-opened, the interior has been lovingly refurbished but the exterior is in utter disrepair, with chunks of plaster sliding off to reveal a fairly shoddy brick job below. Bricks were a huge deal for Moscow--stone was just so incredibly expensive and inaccessible here, most structures were built of wood, which was cheap and plentiful, and which burned regularly. I was just reading in the Zhilishchno-Zemelnyi Otdel files about the dire flammability of revolutionary Moscow--the city was counting more than 45 fires a day in 1920, many of which were serious enough to render the buildings where they happened entirely unusable, often for several years. That means unoccupied, plumbing bursts, windows broken. Find me another place that in the face of all this would have so many wooden buildings standing at all. And balance that out with the need to keep the city livable by modern standards. For all people scream about Baturina and Luzhkov and their underground parking garages, anyone who has walked around the center for a single day knows how desperate the parking situation is and how it is coming close to destroying anywhere within the ring as viable to foot traffic. Traffic is not, god knows, why Luzhkov got the boot, despite what Sobianin tells us, but it's bad here, people, it's really really bad. And not just for the drivers. And totally failing to regulate parking, with the result that sidewalks have become long, thin parking lots, is not the answer. Build some underground parking. But then of course, as we know from metro construction, you run up into the problem of the wet, wet land Moscow is built on. But probably they've figured out how to deal with that by now.
