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JAMES S. RUSSELL
THE AGILE CITY
Building Well-being and Wealth in
an Era of Climate Change
Washington | Covelo | London

© 2011, James S. Russell
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No
part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in
writing from the publisher: Island Press, Suite 300, 1718 Connecticut Ave., NW,
Washington, DC 20009
ISLAND PRESS is a trademark of the Center for Resource Economics.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Russell, James S.
The agile city : building well-being and wealth in an era of climate change /
By James S. Russell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59726-724-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-59726-724-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-59726-725-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-59726-725-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Climatic changes. 2. Climatic changes—Government policy. 3. Economic
development. 4. Sustainable development. 5.Financial crises—History—21st century.
I. Title.
QC903.R87 2011
363.738'74561—dc22
2011005024
Printed on recycled, acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
KEYWORDS: Carbon neutrality, climate change adaptation, climate change mitigation,
community planning, energy efﬁciency, environmental design and planning, green
architecture, green building, green infrastructure, grey infrastructure, megaburbs,
neoburbs, New Orleans rebuilding, sustainable communities, sustainable transportation,
water resources

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Elements of this book gestated over a long time, and many people have been of
inestimable help. The late Astra Zarina, who founded the Architecture in Rome
program at the University of Washington, introduced me to the ways a great
city works. I was able to document the lay of the American urban landscape
thanks to insightful editors at Architectural Record: Mildred Schmertz, Stephen
Kliment, and Robert Ivy. Manuela Hoelterhoff has been a staunch champion of
architecture at Bloomberg. Jeff Weinstein has focused my written vagaries at
three different publications.
The New York State Council on the Arts, Bermard Tschumi at Columbia
University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, and
Sal LaRosa and Ron Bentley have offered welcome financial (and at times
moral) support.
It has been a privilege to work with Michael Gallis and benefit from his as-
tounding insights. I have cited many people in the book whose research or ex-
perience has enriched the argument, but some I’ve relied on again and again:
Michael Gallis, Christopher Leinberger, Clark Stevens in Montana, Jeanne
Nathan and Robert Tannen in New Orleans, Robert Bruegmann in Chicago, and
the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy in Cambridge. Thanks also go to Tracy
Metz in Amsterdam, David Cohn in Madrid, Peter Slatin, Cathleen McGuigan,
Nancy Levinson, Roberta Brandes Gratz, Kenneth Frampton, Amanda Burden,
Barry Bergdoll, and Ada Louise Huxtable. At Island Press, heartfelt thanks to
editor Heather Boyer and to Courtney Lix and Rebecca Bright.
I could not have gotten this book done without Robert Hughes, Hil-
lary Brown, S.J. Rozan, Monty Freeman, Amy Schatz, and Max Rudin. I am the
lucky beneficiary of unflagging love, support, and inspiration from Steven Blier.
xi

xiii
PROLOGUE
Carbon-neutral Now
The blond stone walls and handsome vaulted roof of Kroon Hall have an un-
assuming barnlike presence amid neo-Gothic neighbors at Yale University. An
intimate plaza, a pleasing meeting place for the School of Forestry and Envi-
ronmental Studies, welcomes you. Hefty wooden louvers on the tall, narrow
entrance side cut afternoon sun (figure P.1). Inside, sun filters down the wood-
paneled main stair, inviting you to climb to the top-floor reading room, with its
gracefully vaulting ceiling. There, photovoltaic panels over skylights shower
celestial light, perfectly balanced by stripes of sunlight seeping through the
louvered end wall. You might notice the little green and red lights next to the
windows that signal when natural breezes can be used instead of heating and
cooling, but you probably do not know that five very-low-energy systems heat
and cool the building. It’s not obvious that Kroon’s long narrow shape mini-
mizes absorption of summer heat while gathering the low winter sun and
grabbing passing breezes for ventilation. Though the building fits as comfort-
ably as an old pair of jeans, Hopkins Architects, of London, working with the
locally based Centerbrook Architects and Planners, have calibrated every de-
tail of this new office and seminar-room building to produce, husband, or har-
vest energy (figure P.2).
A few years ago, a building could garner headlines because it cut energy use
20 or 30 percent from today’s norms. Kroon aimed much higher, at “carbon
neutrality”: reducing to zero the heat-trapping gases that warm the planet.1
Zero. A few years ago, experts would have said you can’t get there. But
improvements in building design, technology, and construction now make
carbon-neutral buildings an increasingly reachable goal. Electric cars can be

Figure P.1 Kroon Hall, Yale University. The louvers on the east-facing side of this build-
ing are one of many tactics designed by Hopkins Architects with Centerbrook Architects
to achieve near zero-carbon emissions. Credit: © Robert Benson
Figure P.2 The daylighted top-floor reading room and café at Kroon Hall, Yale Univer-
sity. Photovoltaic panels over skylights generate energy and filter the sun, which balances
sidelight seeping through the building’s protective exterior louvers. Credit: © Robert
Benson

PROLOGUE | xv
considered zero emission only if the power that charges them comes from rela-
tively rare renewable sources. Workable zero-emission coal-fired power plants
and zero-emission gas-driven ones look far away in time.
As global warming effects become more evident, and the debate over what
to do about it becomes more difficult, it’s important to know that buildings
can get to zero. After all, they are responsible for almost 40 percent of US
greenhouse gas emissions.
A geothermal well system draws heat from the earth in winter and cools
in the summer. A displacement-ventilation system relies on the buoyancy
of warm air to ventilate the building with only minimal fan use. These devices
cost more, and are unusual but not exotic. “The only way to make really ef-
ficient buildings is to employ as many different strategies as possible,” Hopkins’s
director, Michael Taylor, says. “We reduced energy demand by 50 percent, and
then met 25 percent of the energy needs with a 100-kilowatt photovoltaic array,
so we have a resulting 62.5 percent reduction in our carbon footprint.” This
isn’t zero but comprises the state of the carbon-reduction art at this writing.
Pull the focus out to the scale of communities, though, and you can see
how much more can be accomplished.
At the western edge of North America, on the southern tip of the moun-
tainous and densely forested Vancouver Island, Dockside Green has already
become carbon positive. The mix of town houses, mid-rise apartments, and
commercial buildings is rising in phases on a narrow, fifteen-acre former in-
dustrial site just above the famous Inner Harbor of Victoria, British Columbia
(figure P.3).
Dockside Green harnesses economies of scale to affordably build in car-
bon-reduction measures that are impractical for single buildings. From an
apartment rooftop, where owners tend rows of lettuce, you can look down on
a stream, planted with native wetland grasses, that burbles in front of the out-
door terraces of town houses (figure P.4). The stream is clean enough that
crayfish thrive and ducks nest even though it mixes runoff from rain-harvest-
ing gardens and water treated in an on-site sewage plant. Vancouver architec-
ture firm Busby Perkins + Will (master planner of the site) designed the first
eight buildings to cross ventilate and to capture warmth from the low winter
sun, as Kroon does. Awnings automatically unfurl to cut unwanted heat. These
tactics, with 100 percent fresh-air mechanical ventilation, make the elimina-
tion of air-conditioning possible in Victoria’s temperate climate. Meters in each
apartment provide real-time information on water use, heating bills, and elec-

xvi | PROLOGUE
trical use. The flickering data mesmerize owners, who scamper about, snuff-
ing phantom kilowatts. With familiar devices, such as compact-fluorescent
lighting and Energy Star appliances, Dockside Green cuts its energy use by
more than 50 percent below Canada’s building-code standards.
As the project got under way, Joe Van Belleghem, a partner at Windmill
West (Dockside Green’s codeveloper, with Vancity, a credit union), got plenty
of local attention when he promised to write the city a $1 million check if any
of the buildings fell below Platinum-level certification (the highest tier) of the
LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green-building rating
system. So far, he has not had to pay up. Dockside Green will eventually in-
clude twenty-six buildings and be home to about twenty-five hundred people
in three neighborhoods. At that scale, the developers were able to afford to
build a biomass gasification plant, which accelerates the decomposition of
construction-waste wood into a clean-burning biogas that supplies hot water
and hydronic heating to the entire development. Van Belleghem collects fees
from residents for the heat and hot water he provides, which will largely pay
for the plant’s construction. By producing its own heating fuel and supplying
the excess output to an adjacent hotel, according to architect Peter Busby,
Figure P.3 Overview of the early phases of Dockside Green, in Victoria, British Colum-
bia. Its location near downtown allows residents to get to destinations along a bike path
that runs along the Inner Harbor and on a passenger ferry that crosses it. Credit: Cour-
tesy Dockside Green

PROLOGUE | xvii
Dockside Green makes up for the carbon content of the electricity it needs
from the grid to power lights and appliances. That’s how it is carbon positive.
Dockside Green goes a step further by helping to reduce auto dependency,
which saves more energy and reduces the carbon footprint of everyday activi-
ties. Its location links residents to four bus lines, a tiny passenger ferry—cute
Figure P.4 At Dockside Green, storm runoff and water treated in an
on-site sewage plant combine in a naturalized stream that creates an
amenity for residents as it keeps polluted water out of Victoria’s
sparkling Inner Harbor. Credit: Courtesy Dockside Green

as a toy—that chugs to various locations around the bay, and the Galloping
Goose bike path, which has become a commuting artery. The developer also
subsidizes membership in a local car cooperative. “We encourage you to
become a member and get in the habit of not using your own car,” Van
Belleghem says. The developer will pay $25,000 to buy back the parking space
built for each unit.2
Kroon and Dockside are both pioneering and quotidian. They use ad-
vanced but proven technologies. Neither is noticeably an “eco building,”
ostentatiously showing off solar panels, nor do they demand lifestyle changes
(through Dockside makes biking to work easy). Both the building and the
community are more appealing and functional than conventional versions.
In the total absence of a coherent American approach to climate change,
both Kroon and Dockside Green go deeply green, showing how quickly such
strategies are progressing. If you want to achieve carbon neutrality today, even
the most efficient designs must augment with solar, wind, biofuel, or hydro-
power, and these sources demand special conditions (a breeze, a dammed
stream nearby) or a considerable amount of space (solar), and usually cost
much more per square foot than conservation measures do (as was the case at
Kroon). Indeed, Yale balked at the cost and land area needed to fully meet
Kroon’s energy needs on-site. (It purchased carbon credits to get to zero.) Had
the university chosen to build a district power plant that used renewable fuel,
as Dockside Green does, Yale would not have needed to purchase the credits,
and it would have reduced the carbon footprint of any building hooked onto
the system.
Most buildings and settings cannot yet cost-effectively lower their energy
and carbon impact to such a great degree. You begin to see that the barriers
are not overwhelming, however. The Agile City is about how buildings and
communities help the United States rapidly close its yawning green perform-
ance gap while making places that work better and realize our dreams.
xviii | PROLOGUE

INTRODUCTION
The Concrete Metropolis in a Dynamic Era
In a very short time the United States has realized that global warming poses
real challenges to the nation’s future. The Agile City engages the fundamental
question of what to do about it.
The big talk is of “alternative energy”: hydrogen-powered cars and biofuels;
clean coal, reinvented nuclear, and elaborate, yet-to-be-perfected means to
store huge amounts of carbon while we figure out what to do with it. Advocates
hope to plug one or more of these clean technologies into the grid and declare
the problem solved. Though appealing, these are speculative technologies that
demand enormous investment and that can work only with very large subsi-
dies. They have large environmental effects we ignore at our peril, and they
may not even prove viable.
As Kroon Hall and Dockside Green show, we can achieve carbon neutrality
today in buildings and communities with efficiency measures that are already
proven and with a dollop of renewable energy. We can retrofit our communities
to drastically reduce the amount of driving we need to do, and therefore reduce
transportation carbon emissions, one of the two largest sources of greenhouse
gases in our economy (the other is buildings). Rethinking construction and our
communities has additional benefits. The word agile appears in this book’s title
because we must adapt our lives to a world that climate change is altering be-
fore our eyes. Clean energy alone is not enough. We face disruptions of weather
patterns and agriculture, acidifying seas, storms, floods, and droughts. Given
the irreversible warming already set in motion, we’ll have to keep changing. In
other words, we’ll need to develop an urban culture of agility.
1
DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-027-9_0, © 2011 James S. Russell
J ,
.S. Russell The Agile City: Building Well-being and Wealth in an Era of Climate Change,

Unlike high-tech alternative energy technologies, The Agile City focuses on
reducing emissions and coping with climate-change effects.
In much of the global warming debate, energy efficiency is treated al-
most condescendingly, as something nice to do but of marginal usefulness. The
Agile City shows that change undertaken at the building and community levels
can reach carbon-reduction goals rapidly, perhaps much quicker and at lower
cost than shoving the economy into carbon submission with a disruptive range
of carbon taxes (then waiting for markets to sort out the problem) or praying
that a big-technology silver bullet will save us and avoid our personal incon-
venience.
It may be that we must ultimately resort to high-tech alternative energy,
nuclear, biofuels, and every conservation measure, as many experts argue. Oth-
ers say it hardly matters what Americans do if the big and growing emitters—
such as China—don’t take steps to drastically cut the carbon they pour into the
atmosphere. But why shouldn’t we exploit the rich potential of conservation
as fast as possible? Why should other countries take action in the absence of
a serious US commitment? At this writing, the United States is the world lag-
gard, unable to move ahead on commonsense conservation strategies that don’t
cost much. Comparatively speaking, conservation and adaptation are the low-
hanging fruit.
Adapting buildings and communities not only promises rapid progress in
reducing America’s carbon footprint but also offers numerous other benefits
that tax gimmicks and massive alternative-energy investments can’t match.
Adapting to the future is as much about changing hidebound attitudes
and examining underlying assumptions as it is about technology and policy.
The Agile City helps the reader identify changes that make large impacts at low
costs. We’ll be wise to think about habitual development patterns, brain-dead
regulatory regimes, and obsolete incentives built in by tax policy. Fixing them
can be frustrating: we have to fight political battles about them, steer rigid bu-
reaucracies in new directions, collaborate with those who are used to guard-
ing turf. But the real costs of these kinds of changes are actually small—and
the benefits large—not just in terms of the environment but because we’ll be
tuning communities to realize broader aspirations: to build wealth more re-
sponsively and to make places that are pleasing to live in. Many strategies are
low-tech and low cost (such as making bicycles a bigger part of our lives), and
others offer handsome paybacks on investment—but only if we confront in-
grained habit about what we build and how we pay for it.
2 | THE AGILE CITY

INTRODUCTION | 3
Why Buildings?
The structures that we live and work in generate almost 40 percent of green-
house gas emissions—and buildings tend to use the dirtiest energy: electricity
generated from coal.1
About 35 percent of the nation’s assets are invested
in real estate and infrastructure, and we’re adding up to 2 percent a year to that
base. Every square foot built by conventional means is already obsolete—and
may have to be remodeled or abandoned in just a few years. Waiting to take
action will prove costly.2
A wide variety of tested tactics exist today to dra-
matically reduce the impacts of buildings on the environment, from old-
fashioned awnings to new ways to light buildings with the sun and ventilate
them with breezes. We’re just leaving them on the table.
Why Communities?
Rather than devote enormous amounts of time and treasure to build SUVs that
get fifty miles per gallon on the way to the discount superstore thirty miles
away, The Agile City argues that intelligently designing our towns could reduce
that trip to a few miles or eliminate it entirely. That’s just one way that building
(and upgrading) communities can dramatically reduce the land we plow under,
the energy we consume, and the aggravation we endure in the course of daily
tasks.
Why Buildings and Communities?
Environment-enhancing investments pay back more quickly when build-
ing strategies are coordinated with neighborhood layouts and urban networks.
For example, a group of buildings can amortize the up-front costs of a shared
geothermal well much more quickly than sinking wells for each structure.
Thinking about the design of an entire city block at once, rather than one
building at a time, means that every room in each building can be flooded with
daylight so that few rooms need to rely on electric lights. Or, one structure can
shade another from the heat of the afternoon sun. Cities can be remade to cope
with the greater frequency of flooding, drought, forest fires, and wildfires,
rather than await the enormous costs of catastrophe.
Coping with climate change cannot be compartmentalized when the urban
places we share face so many other challenges. Good jobs have involved

steadily longer and more congested commutes to affordable neighborhoods.
Housing costs rise while communities decline and schools struggle. Fast-
growing places deliver more traffic than opportunity. Broadly speaking, The
Agile City shows how communities can develop the capacity to adapt to circum-
stance—whatever those circumstances may be. Real progress can be made only
if tactics that engage global warming offer collateral benefits, as many do.
If we focus on arranging related urban functions close together, we multiply
benefits. Think about locating a hospital not on just any old empty piece of
land but close to doctors and labs and aligned to key transit routes. Then many
staffers can get to work, patients can get care, and service businesses can access
customers without driving. In this way, we reduce traffic, pollution, energy,
time wasted, and the need for huge parking lots all at once.
Is Undertaking Large-scale Change Worth It?
We’ll shiver under layers of organic-wool sweaters living colorless lives con-
fined to our dimly lit homes, say the skeptics, as we sabotage our economy by
struggling to get to jobs in speed-limited biofueled buses. The skeptics have
rarely done their homework. On the other hand, advocates often seem to turn
every purchasing decision and lifestyle choice into a moral dilemma—for ex-
ample, paper or plastic, which is worse? If we layer on rules and taxes and com-
mand lifestyle choices in a single-minded drive toward carbon neutrality, we
could well damage our economy and fuel a backlash instead of an evolution to-
ward sustainability.
We won’t recognize the true potential of sustainability by analyzing it
in today’s narrow economic terms, by describing economic paybacks for energy
conservation, for example, solely in terms of electricity costs avoided at current
prices. Saving energy does save money, while also reducing greenhouse gases
and other kinds of air pollution. It also reduces the strain on electricity-delivery
infrastructure. It cuts the amount of energy we must import, thereby reduc-
ing the nation’s payment imbalance. It presses energy prices downward by
freeing supply, and it reduces the power of global-energy oligopolies. Those
benefits can be more difficult to calculate but are no less real. It is clear that
alternatives—including business as usual—offer far less useful paybacks. The
Agile City reveals tactics that create such multiplier effects, which means that
ecologically driven change can shore up economic opportunity, make more
productive workplaces, and help revive neglected communities. These are not
Pollyanna blandishments. Being able to look at multiple effects and multiple
4 | THE AGILE CITY

benefits of political choices and private investments is essential to ensuring
wealth and well-being in the future.
A ROADMAP
In part 1, The Agile City considers land, our attitudes toward it, and our meth-
ods of dividing it up and building on it for human use. Coming to terms with
climate change means that people must proactively make choices about what is
built where. That’s a culture change for Americans, who have long seen land,
and what’s done with it, as equating freedom. And that has meant that America
has passively left the making of cities in the hands of owners and speculators.
Communities have already become deeply unhappy about the simplistic
choices they seem to face: Accept the increasingly destructive consequences of
growth through the heedless accumulation of individual investments? Or, try to
recognize community values by entwining development with an increasingly
complex, costly, and often ineffective regulatory apparatus?
The Agile City shows how to get beyond those simplistic, lose-lose dualities
by engaging America’s conflicting but deeply held values relating to the role of
private property in society. New ideas about ownership help us come to terms
with environmental issues without losing the freedom of action that old ideas
were supposed to preserve. Ignoring what the future portends will only make
land conflicts wrenchingly difficult to resolve—as they proved to be after the
tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, when disaster relief too often meant rebuilding in
unsafe places. Concepts of ownership evolved in the past as the United States
transformed itself from a small-town agrarian nation to a big-city, industrial
powerhouse. We can learn from that history as we renegotiate our relationship
to land.
As chapter 2 will show, the needed conversation has already begun.
In precious landscapes all over the United States, people are uniting once-
warring constituencies as they sensitively integrate human activities into more
resilient environments, from played-out ranches in the Rocky Mountain West to
eroding coastal beaches everywhere. Barriers aplenty obstruct a future that must
value innovation, adaptability, and diverse scales of economic endeavor. But
many are cultural and political, not financial or technical.
Communities cannot dynamically adapt to the future if the drivers of
wealth and growth are at cross purposes—as they are in America. We may work
in a factory or keyboard on a computer, but it is the city itself that is the field of
INTRODUCTION | 5

growth and wealth creation. Cities thrive or stagnate by the way real estate is
financed, by the way housing subsidies are distributed, by the way transporta-
tion is provided, and by the way water is obtained, distributed, and disposed of.
Part 2 shows how these “growth machine” forces powerfully and dysfunction-
ally shape communities, and how this fragmented, unintegrated assortment of
stimuli fails.
Growth machine distortions caused suburbia to go viral, creating the
megaburb, a new kind of city that only looks suburban but integrates cities,
suburbs, and semirural exurbs. (Since all these places are now urban, even
if low density, The Agile City refers to them as cities.) Megaburbs metastasized on
a model of supposedly affordable urban growth that demanded families move
to newer communities ever farther out, locking in a land-hungry, energy-
intensive lifestyle of vast driving distances between Oz-like suburban down-
towns. Though our suburban conurbations may create great wealth and contain
many communities that seek to preserve closeness to nature, these politically
fragmented landscapes have few tools to act in concert to further their inter-
ests. Growth machine forces tend to suburbanize country idylls while sapping
denser, otherwise desirable older towns and cities of vitality. Megaburbs, how-
ever, may prove more adaptable than we yet know, since they encompass so
much space that’s wasted or ignored.
After all, global warming is only one reason we need to understand bet-
ter how our communities get created—why some grow and others stagnate.
Many of us find ourselves increasingly ready to move out of cities that seem al-
ways headed in the wrong direction: more congested, more expensive, farther
from the fields and forests promised by the suburban dream, with too many
hours stuck in a car and taxes always rising. American cities today grow and
change reactively—and they take mystifying new forms because we haven’t
taken the future in hand.
Part 3 considers the kinds of places an agile growth machine could create.
Homes, workplaces, and public places not only can reduce their impact on the
planet but can do so by updating traditional technologies, such as the lowly yet
versatile window shutter. Buildings and neighborhoods can evocatively express
the uniqueness of their places and climates: harvesting natural sources of sun,
daylight, shade, fresh air, and cooling to do what we’ve spent a couple of gen-
erations engineering expensive and complex mechanical systems to do.
As building design and construction rapidly evolves (no man-to-the-moon
effort necessary), the United States can transcend its habit of making cities al-
6 | THE AGILE CITY

INTRODUCTION | 7
most entirely as an assemblage of ventures that leave no room for any value
other than profit. The Agile City is not a call for faith-based greening. Rather
than pile on too many do-gooder agendas, it shows how to build well-being
and wealth at the same time. Along the way, this generation can pass on its best
values, as past generations whose buildings we venerate have, and enrich the
places we share rather than simply aggrandize who each of us thinks we are.
Adaptation is an urgent cause in some communities: climate-change effects
like flooding and coastal erosion already threaten their survival. Such com-
munities face wrenching choices, but even less vulnerable cities and towns are
recognizing that today’s diffuse, low-density, one-size-fits-all development
model no longer works. Diversifying development patterns—creating a range
of densities—is becoming necessary for economic success in a more closely in-
tegrated world, and it can go hand in hand with reducing environmental im-
pact. Linking communities at a variety of densities with suitable transportation,
for example, diversifies economic potential while reducing dependency on
driving. Economic engines, such as universities, medical research centers, and
suburban downtowns, already find they need to cluster more, thriving near
high-density residential neighborhoods. High-intensity business and residen-
tial cores work better when they’re walkable, bikable, and well served by tran-
sit. Intensifying transportation modes (roads, commuter rail, high-speed rail,
and enhanced freight rail) along natural movement corridors will reduce con-
gestion and carbon emissions while linking more people, more businesses, and
more customers.
In this way, cities will also create the scale and diversity needed to compete
in a global economy of megacities. We’ll create incentives to rebuild overlooked
swaths of cities and suburbs that have been ignored, rather than mortgage our
future on energy-intense communities, built to last only one generation, that
are flung into new landscapes that we can no longer afford to maintain. Cities
as diverse as Portland (Oregon), Vancouver (British Columbia), and Berlin
show how to harvest public consensus and individual leadership to compre-
hensively nurture adaptive development and urban revitalization—forging a
contemporary identity that merges business and citizen commitment.
We’ll find more efficiencies by planning our communities at the metropoli-
tan and metro-region scale—matching the scale of economic exchange and en-
vironmental potential today. We’ll need to rapidly foster innovation and to
mainstream winning ideas; for example, the US Green Building Council’s LEED
(Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system has already

become a widely emulated model for crowd-sourcing innovation at the build-
ing and community scale. It’s just one way to create agility in the seemingly
immutable “permanent” communities we make.
While many states have been creating green-technology incentives, the na-
tional political debate has long been locked into false choices. The presumption
too often goes unchallenged that carbon taxes or mobility taxes will simply de-
prive people of income. Properly designed, of course, they will shift incentives
and disincentives to encourage investments that are more productive environ-
mentally and economically. That’s how we begin to create both an environmen-
tal and an economic ethos of dynamism that’s entrepreneurial, receptive to the
new, and perpetually adaptable. That’s what America’s supposedly loosely regu-
lated and individualist land ethos is supposed to provide but doesn’t, except
in landscapes beyond the urban edge that are affordable only because of dis-
tortions introduced by the growth machine. But “loose-fit” urban conditions—
ample developable property, easy access, and the most minimal regulations
necessary—can be, and need to be, created in mature places as well as on
empty land. The Agile City shows how to create the urban-planning equivalent
of open-source computer code. An agile, loose-fit city will deploy regulations
straightforwardly, balancing them with incentives. Rules will reward perform-
ance (energy, water, and emissions saved) rather than prescribing what light-
bulbs we’ll use and what cars we’ll drive.
The mortgage meltdown that began in 2007 should have brought an end to
bubble economics—desperate means to jump-start sluggish economies
by bribing consumers (through subsidies and tax gimmicks) to buy more stuff
made from artificially cheap resources that are becoming scarcer and more
costly as they get exploited beyond recovery, from forests to fisheries, from
oil to copper. The Great Recession, the collapse of global natural systems, and
the rapidly increasing development of huge nations such as India and China
require us to ask where genuinely sustainable wealth and well-being will come
from. To a surprising extent, chapter 10 argues, wealth may well flow from
green investments. Many green measures offer unique economic values that
conventional accounting tends to miss. Few anticipated that cleaning the na-
tion’s air and water in the 1970s would restore enormous real estate value to
cities, rural places, and coastlines. Skillfully designed green investments often
boost well-being while repairing natural systems, which gross domestic prod-
uct (GDP) fails to measure. Capturing these advantages can make restoring the
natural workings of nature vital to the bottom line.
8 | THE AGILE CITY

INTRODUCTION | 9
NATURE BITES US BACK
Climate change is the focus of The Agile City, but the world’s web of natural sys-
tems is so tightly interlocked—and the human impact on it now so great—that
we can no longer afford to look at any problem as the environmental issue of
the day. Climate change nests within several major, interrelated environmental
challenges, all of which are amenable to a variety of solutions at the level of
the urban systems with which we’ve laced the world. In this book, responding
to climate change means responding to these interrelated issues to the extent
possible.
An era of hypergrowth that has had profound environmental consequences
began when the capitalist world began to draw in the vast territories of Russia,
its satellites, and China after the fall of the Iron Curtain of Communism around
1990, later joined by India, Brazil, and others.3
Every country in the world be-
came more economically entwined with the global economic juggernaut.4
The
developing world will continue to fuel most of the world’s growth, as hundreds
of millions of Brazilians, Indians, Russians, and Chinese vault from abject
poverty into the global middle class, probably joined by such populous nations
as Mexico and Indonesia. One estimate predicts that US gross domestic prod-
uct will triple by 2050, but India will catch up with America and China will
generate more than twice America’s output.5
Is such massive growth even possible? Many environmental advocates, and
an increasing number of economists, think not. After all, a better life for billions
has more than doubled demands on nature in the past forty-five years.6
Already
this unprecedented consumption burdens global ecologies to a degree unimag-
inable just a decade or so ago. The environmental triumphs of the past, such as
slashing tailpipe emissions and transforming rivers from sewers to swimmable
sanctuaries, look small compared to the cleanup tasks in many parts of the
world.
Ecosystems over time have often proved resilient to human use, capable of
healing. But human actions no longer harm a forest here and there or pollute
the air only around big cities. We’re altering vast landscapes at a regional and
continental scale. In too many places, people have gone too far; we’ve over-
stretched the resilience of too many of the biological systems on which we rely.
The world is draining aquifers and pouring mining and industrial waste,
pesticides, and fertilizers into rivers, streams, lakes, and bays, which become
unsafe to drink, unusable for irrigation, and inhospitable to fish. Rains scour

soil from deforested landscapes and played-out farms, degrading water quality
and amplifying floods. As the process continues, it becomes much more diffi-
cult to restore either soils or waterways to productive use. Global warming may
only exacerbate these processes. Low-lying parts of the world, for example, fear
the loss of freshwater sources to saltwater infiltration as sea levels rise.7
Around the globe, people breathe killer air, wallow in their own waste, and
can’t obtain clean water. Food crops won’t grow because the land is ruined and
there is no water. And yet we rarely admit to these costs. Economists call them
“externalities,” aptly underlining the fact that we don’t figure them into what
we pay for goods and services.
This overview does not engage the enormous demands that global growth
will place on nonrenewable resources, from oil and natural gas to the huge as-
sortment of minerals that high-tech industry demands. It is difficult to estimate
whether the world has indeed entered the claimed “peak oil” era because both
private companies and energy-exporting nations tend to keep such data secret.
And for most commodities, the size of the resource is elastic, dependent on
how much is recycled, how fast technology comes on line, and how much con-
sumers are willing to pay for extraction and refinement.8
In the past few years,
for example, America’s claimed natural gas reserves have risen enormously not
because of new discoveries but because new technologies and higher prices
make exploitation of existing reserves financially viable. As the Deepwater
Horizon disaster of 2010 reminded us, these new techniques come at greater
risk to the environment—risks we plan for and account for too infrequently.
Ecologists have begun to see feedback loops: human actions that hasten en-
vironmental decline, which hastens the decline of natural resources we can’t
live without.9
Discrete effects, such as air or water pollution, now interact with
other environmental effects to feed a self-reinforcing cycle of environmental de-
struction that threatens us, as global warming does, with its diverse effects:
from killing coral in the tropics to unleashing the devastating spruce budworm
in northern forests.10
I am indebted to Michael Gallis, an urban strategist and city planner
based in Charlotte, North Carolina, for connecting globalization, intensifying
resource use, and its environmental consequences, which he dubs “Co-
devolution.”11
Americans—and most of those who live in the developed world—are for
now isolated from the most severe of these effects. By reducing pollution, pre-
serving valued landscapes, and saving endangered species, the United States
10 | THE AGILE CITY

blunts the rapid environmental decline that does so much harm around the
globe.12
That does not mean that wealthy nations escape the consequences,
however. Habitat losses and strained agriculture worldwide affect what wood
we can buy, what foods we can import, and what we pay for these items. If we
don’t address ecosystem decline, the consequences will only restrict our op-
tions more as time goes on. We’re also competing for nature’s ability to support
our needs, called biocapacity, along with everyone else.13
Are these vast challenges a recipe for fatalism or inaction? After all, how can
we respond when so many threats come at us from all sides? We can no longer
afford to consider our collective actions, which Gallis calls the human net-
work, apart from their effect on natural systems. Growth and well-being will in-
creasingly depend on restoring and creating resilience in nature rather than
heedlessly exploiting it. This is not ecological altruism but a recognition that
Co-devolutionary effects will only loom larger, cutting into economic growth,
spurring resource-scarcity battles, exacting an ever higher price in ways we
can’t anticipate.
“We have long pretended that natural resources are cheap,” explains
Gallis. That has led to what he calls “low efficiency” use of those once abun-
dant resources, with corresponding “high impact” on the natural environment.
Scarcity economies have quickly developed for water, fish, many kinds of
woods, and some agricultural products, Gallis argues, “because we’ve failed to
recognize that we must reverse the equation. Our economy must build on the
high-efficiency use of limited, increasingly expensive resources. Our actions
must rebuild natural systems, if for no other reason than that we need those
systems to keep producing resources for us.”14
Gallis was asked, how do you
expect people, even those most devoted to doing good, to forgo their own in-
terests in favor of the environment? The degree to which Co-devolution
is damaging our economy and constricting our choices, Gallis responded, is
forcing us to do good for the environment as we do well for ourselves.
Although The Agile City focuses overwhelmingly on climate change, I con-
sider the issues it raises in these terms of what Gallis calls Co-Evolution:
human-network actions that can systematically restore natural systems to
health and resiliency.
The Agile City approaches these extraordinary challenges through an appeal
to the heart and the head. Even though too many Americans struggle just to
make ends meet, we rely on our hearts to set the nation’s course to the future
INTRODUCTION | 11

based on what kind of people we choose to be and what kind of legacy we want
to leave behind for our children. So you’ll find a deep look into our values and
our culture; the book is not arguing on the basis of statistics alone. Still, we
need to know how much we spend, how serious problems are, and whether so-
lutions are scaled to solve the problems at hand, and I provide the most ac-
curate figures I can find. Another reason the book does not barrage you with
statistics is that too many are inaccurate either because the data is lacking (the
United States does a poor job of collecting information on urban performance)
or because a great number of assumptions that underlie the numbers add too
much uncertainty, and partisans of one position or another often don’t disclose
key assumptions. (In speaking of urban performance, for example, it makes
a difference whether people talk about New York as politically defined—
population some eight million—or the New York City metropolitan area—
population perhaps fifteen million, depending on how you count.) Lastly, the
best news: green techniques and technologies are moving forward very quickly,
in spite of a hostile economic and policy environment. So I’ve avoided setting
out technologies we must adopt or goals (in terms of kilowatt hours or any
other measures) that we should deem essential, because all of it is changing
very rapidly.15
The challenges may be global, but The Agile City focuses primarily on the
United States, where our cities can and must adapt at a scale and speed that
is unprecedented. It is not the overwhelming task it might seem. The book
helps readers take charge of their community’s future by understanding the
processes that make communities dynamic and adaptable. The future seems so
challenging only because we’ve allowed our adaptive skills to atrophy. We’ve
accepted the idea that communities grow, mature, stagnate, and decline by eco-
nomic forces as immutable as the tides. In fact, most of the mechanisms that
drive development and building design are artificial inventions of government
and finance—unique to America, if not particularly well suited to what Amer-
ica has become. To the extent that they have a purpose (and are not simply
habitual), they continue a simplistic, obsolete, one-size-fits-all method of city-
making that is neither agile nor very adaptable.
Our collective job is not to assume a defensive crouch but to open our
minds to possibilities, the many that are out there already and the multitude we
need to encourage people to think up.
12 | THE AGILE CITY

1
CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE
LANDSCAPES OF SPECULATION
On a visit to a traditional stepped-gable North Sea town in Holland’s
Delftlands called Scheveningen, I climbed with a group over a broad
grassy dune that looked like the back of a four-story-high humped sea creature.
A beach, among the widest I had ever seen, stretched out before us. We were
being shown not works of nature but works of civil engineering. This massive
dune and beach were created to shield the village from North Sea storms of
growing violence. The Dutch are good at this sort of thing, having been forced
to keep the sea out of their low-lying landscape for hundreds of years.1
The super dune and beach were an example of how seriously the Dutch
take global warming effects, which they are already feeling, not just on the coast
but in rainwater that fills drainage systems and in larger and more prolonged
river flooding. (The Rhine River and many of its tributaries drain much of Eu-
rope through Holland.) The issue is especially urgent as much of the country is
below sea level and weather changes threaten to overwhelm already elaborate
protections.
I tried to imagine such beach fortification along low-lying American coasts.
Would residents agree to hunker behind such a massive ridge of sand, one that
would deprive them of their view and easy access? Who would pay the tens of
millions of dollars per mile? (Similar protections were considered by Amer-
ica’s dam and levee builders, the US Army Corps of Engineers, for the Katrina-
battered coast of Mississippi, but they never gained favor.)
15
DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-027-9_1, © 2011 James S. Russell
J ,
.S. Russell The Agile City: Building Well-being and Wealth in an Era of Climate Change,

16 | THE LAND
The Netherlands does what America can’t yet do because its cultural and
legal approach to land is profoundly different from America’s. This is why a
book about communities becomes a book about land. Cities do not happen
without citizens making choices about how to divide and parcel land, and
about what can get built where.
US senator Mary Landrieu is determined to bring the Dutch approach to
flood protection, and its technical prowess, to America. She led the delega-
tion that scaled the Scheveningen dune so that Lisa Jackson, head of the US En-
vironmental Protection Agency and representatives of the Army Corps could
see what was possible. Landrieu had become a convert to the Dutch approach
as she looked for means to protect and restore the coastline of nineteen fast-
eroding Louisiana parishes—about one-third of the state she represents. Coastal
marshes that nurture fisheries and protect low-lying towns and cities have been
shrinking alarmingly since well before Katrina (1,900 square miles lost since
the 1930s2
), but the storm dramatically weakened coastal defenses. She had a
plan, but it could cost $50 billion and was going nowhere in Congress. The
Netherlands, with a population the size of Florida’s, commits between 5 billion
and 7 billion euros annually to water management (which equals up to $9 bil-
lion). By contrast, “I can’t even find a couple of hundred million,” said Landrieu
on the tour. “I’m pushing to the point where I’m aggravating people in Con-
gress. But they need to understand how much we need to do.” With hurricane
season approaching as we spoke, she added, “people are living in abject fear.”
No hurricane pummeled Louisiana that summer, but the fate of two flat,
grassy lots on the ocean near Charleston, South Carolina, show what Senator
Landrieu’s campaign was up against—and it wasn’t just the money.
WHOSE PROPERTY RIGHTS?
David Lucas, a developer, expected to build and sell oceanfront homes on
two lots, homes much like those all up and down the beach in the Wild Dunes
development on the idyllic-sounding Isle of Palms. Lucas had not reckoned
with South Carolina’s Beachfront Management Act, which prohibited building
on the lots because the shoreline was unstable.3
Houses so close to the ocean
were also at risk for destruction by the high winds and storm-surge waves of
hurricanes.
Lucas took the state to court, arguing that the act created what in legal
terms is called a “taking” by the government, because it deprived his land of its

CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE LANDSCAPES OF SPECULATION | 17
value. The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment requires the government to pay
compensation to landowners if it takes private property for public use. Though
the clause is intended to assure owners compensation in the case of out-
right appropriation of land (condemnation for use as a highway, for example),
Lucas’s attorneys argued that the Beachfront Management Act constituted a
regulatory taking, in which the government needed to compensate Lucas be-
cause the law caused his property to lose value. When you consider that his lots
were surrounded by lots already developed, it is easy to sympathize. The law
seemed to single him out.
The state’s law, however, was designed to prevent well-documented perils
of heedless coastal development. Up and down the East Coast, the federal gov-
ernment had been throwing billions of dollars into projects that dumped
dredged sand on beaches to protect properties, most of them owned by affluent
people. At times, millions of dollars have been spent rebuilding a beach that
washed away in a single season.
Lucas’s case went to the US Supreme Court, which stopped short of ruling
that he had suffered a taking but ordered the state to take another look at his
claim. South Carolina got the message and eventually allowed Lucas to build. It
and other states have either loosened shoreline regulations or quietly stopped
enforcing them. The Lucas case did not prove to be the landmark that property
rights activists had hoped it would be; subsequent decisions by the Supreme
Court, if anything, have further muddled the question of just what the govern-
ment “owes” landowners when a regulation limits their development options.
In the meantime, hurricanes validated the regulations. In 1992, Hurricane
Andrew, in Florida, wrought more than four times as much damage as Hugo,
just a few years earlier. In 2004, Hurricanes Ivan and Frances slammed both
the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of Florida, killing 108 and leaving $50 billion
in wreckage.4
The year 2005 brought Wilma and Rita, but they have been all
but forgotten because Hurricane Katrina, moving slowly and deliberately,
flattened most of the Mississippi coast and relentlessly probed New Orleans’s
levees until it found vulnerabilities. It was the first hurricane to bring a major
American city to its knees.
The rush to build in harm’s way may seem senseless, but it goes on even
as the effects of climate change—higher floodwaters, more severe storms—raise
well-known risks higher. In the Lucas decision, Justice Antonin Scalia was
skeptical of South Carolina’s reasons for protecting the shoreline (and, of course,
the property abutting it) and proposed that the state may have deprived Lucas
of the entire value of his land in pursuit of mainly esthetic objectives. The Lucas

18 | THE LAND
decision meant a great deal to many people because it struck a blow for in-
dividualism, freedom from intrusion by government, and the entrepreneur-
ial spirit. Yet those sentiments neither restore storm-ravaged communities nor
make whole those who have lost houses to ubiquitously relentless beach
erosion.
Agility, in urban terms, will mean that we can’t mount the property owners’
desires on a pedestal untouchable by wider community concerns. We will have
to act in concert in all kinds of ways. We can’t be mindlessly coercive; nor must
everyone cede power over their lives to a central authority. But slowing climate
change and dealing with its effects will challenge us to rethink our values and
ask ourselves how we meet the challenges of the future in a way that retains
what’s truly fundamental to each of us.
Senator Landrieu has bought into a level of spending on flood control
America has not attempted, but she has also embraced a Dutch culture of land
use in which, comparatively, the desires of the individual landowner count
for little. Over hundreds of years, Holland could never have kept the sea out,
nor diked and drained vast tracts to build new land, if they had to do it one
farmer and land parcel at a time. They needed to do it on a bigger scale and co-
operatively. The result has been to create a culture of consensus, where the
overarching need to keep everyone dry, through the power of government,
takes precedence over the desires of the individual.
This small nation can afford to so elaborately protect Scheveningen because
it is a town that government has shaped into compact form to efficiently use the
land so laboriously reclaimed. The town does not string along the beach for
miles, in the pattern of American shorefront development. The super dune
wraps the oceanfront and sides of the village, yet it is in total less than about a
mile in length.
It is unlikely that Louisiana and the United States will adopt the Dutch
model wholesale. But we will have to learn from the Dutch and others, simply
because the future will require us to renegotiate not only our rules and spend-
ing priorities but also our values and culture of land use—and these run deep.
URBAN REALITY TRUMPS AGRARIAN VISION
The United States became a nation of individual landowners as an alternative
to hierarchical organizations of church and aristocracy in Europe that restricted
political participation to the powerful few owners of land and kept the vast ma-

jority of people in some form of indentured servitude. In an overwhelmingly
agricultural America, founding fathers James Madison and Thomas Jeffer-
son could plausibly regard land itself as wealth, and therefore the key to each
American’s independence. As Joseph Ellis, a historian of the era, puts it, the
Revolution’s “core principal” of individual liberty, which “views any subordina-
tion of personal freedom to governmental discipline as dangerous,” came into
conflict with what developed in the Constitution’s ratification debate “as the
sensible surrender of personal, state, and sectional interests to the larger pur-
poses of nationhood.”5
The agrarian-centered vision conflicted with Alexander Hamilton’s view
that a powerful, centralized state was necessary to survive in a world that even
then featured growing cities, global powers, emerging large-scale industry, and
an international banking system that could exert great power from across
oceans over an economically weak and fragmented young nation. His Federal-
ist vision didn’t resonate, writes Ellis: “At the nub of the argument the colonist
had used to discredit the authority of Parliament and the British monarchy was
a profound distrust of any central authority that issued directives from a great
distance.”
The Hamiltonian views and the Jeffersonian views were left unresolved by
the founding fathers, argues Ellis: “Both sides speak for the deepest impulses of
the American revolution.” Yet Jefferson’s bucolic vision of the landowning agri-
cultural America won people’s hearts (figure 1.1). Hamilton’s more pragmatic
outlook anticipated the enormous growth and concentration of financial power
that occurred over ensuing decades and the parallel rise of cities of unimagined
size as centers of wealth creation. The city sophisticate fleecing the honest yeo-
man has long been a staple of American literature—cementing in people’s
minds a perpetual suspicion of cities and city “slickers.”
Madison—and to an even greater extent, Jefferson—famously thought eco-
nomic success lay in getting government out of the way to allow natural
economic laws of growth to proceed. This sentiment has largely governed the
American attitude toward land use ever since. The idea that government should
not actively organize, promote, and control land use and development, how-
ever, is almost unique in the world.6
The Jeffersonian reluctance to constrict owners in their use of land remains
deep-seated in the American consciousness even as our society and economy
have transformed themselves well beyond any state imaginable by the founding
generation. As the nation grew and moved from its agrarian roots to become a
“Hamiltonian” industrialized powerhouse with an increasingly urban and fi-

20 | THE LAND
nance-dependent economy, an individualist ethos alone would guide the way
land was turned to urban use.
It’s a model of growth that got established early. William Penn laid out
Philadelphia in 1681 with the idealistic vision that the chaotic, disease-ridden
city of the Old World could be supplanted by a rationally organized, spacious,
and green city carved out of the New World’s wilderness. He drew tree-lined,
generously scaled blocks, lined with large houses entwined by gardens. Green
public squares interrupted the grid of streets. It was beautiful—and doomed.
Speculators quickly drove narrow alleys through the spacious blocks and filled
the back gardens with fetid tenements.
The making of cities through speculation has been the story of American
growth ever since. The approach is taken for granted to such an extent that it’s
hard to imagine any other way of doing things, though, in fact, growth through
privatized land development is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of
cities. (Historically, religions and empires, both political and mercantile, had
Figure 1.1 Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Jef-
ferson lived away from America’s early cities and built his house to face the seemingly
endless wildness of nature, reflecting his belief that a nation of landowning farmers
would truly be free. Credit: James S. Russell

largely guided city growth.) Funded by ever more sophisticated private finance
and energized by the great wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution, co-
lonial villages became fast-growing privatized cities, such as New York and
Philadelphia. They made good on the promise of opportunity that was at the
root of the American idea, and they rewarded hard work, even though they
were also degrading, criminal, immoral, and exploitative. While the dream of
America drew millions from the crushing serfdoms of Europe, the vast majority
ended up not on the character-building farms or installed amid pure wilderness
but in the cities, with their opportunities, exploitations, and temptations.
A primacy of landowners’ rights governed even as villages became metropo -
lises and a farm might suddenly find a smoke-belching, mile-long steel plant as
its neighbor. With the growth of industry and the gathering of people in cities,
land became less a source of personal sustenance and more a potential source of
monetary wealth. Privatism remains the reigning American city-making model:
we try to accommodate any entrepreneur anywhere.7
Our Jeffersonian reluc-
tance to tell landowners what they can do works well—until we hear of plans to
run a new beltway past our backyard. Then we take to the streets and airwaves.
Speculators act; the rest of us react. It’s a clumsy and often growth-
strangling way to reconcile the diverse values we hold as both citizens and own-
ers. In an era that must respond to unprecedented environmental challenges, it’s
not good enough.
In January 2006, I visited New Orleans, ravaged four months earlier by
Hurricane Katrina. In small sections of the city, contractors clogged the streets
with pickups and piles of new siding and roofing, but it was hard to see the old
city springing to life. At that time, I toured the worst areas with local architect
Allen Eskew, who was in favor of what was then called a “shrinking footprint”
to rebuild New Orleans. That was post-Katrina lingo for consolidating rebuild-
ing effort in areas that are the highest above sea level.8
At the time of my visit, about eighty thousand residents had come back to
the city, about one-sixth of the prehurricane population. A Rand Corporation
study thought that only about half the population would return.9
“We can’t
maintain our old infrastructure with such a diminished population and such
limited resources,” Eskew observed as we drove around the city. The “shrink-
ing footprint” idea was first proposed by the Urban Land Institute think tank.
When planners published maps suggesting that immediate reinvestment be
funneled to high-ground areas, people noticed that the left-behind tracts,
whether in poor Central City and the Lower Ninth Ward or in affluent eastern
New Orleans, were predominantly black.10

Rebuilding in risk-prone areas may defy rationality, but returning to the
same house on the same lot, in the same street and neighborhood, was almost a
primordial desire for many New Orleans residents. Rebuilding on high ground
seemed a rational position when the Army Corps could not guarantee flood re-
sistance if a Category 5 storm hit the city (Katrina was a slow-moving Cate-
gory 3). As residents of the very lowest swaths of the city stared at the muddy
waterlines left behind by the flood, they asked themselves who would buy their
property. How would they move? What kind of place would the city be with-
out the old streets, and the seemingly unchanging neighborhoods lined with
modest houses of curlicue carpentry and colorful paint?
What if people didn’t want to move? Would the government force them
out of their homes and into some neighborhood they might not want to be
in? Must they accept whatever money the government offered and see their
houses and streets bulldozed for parks or drainage canals? The planners had not
even begun to engage those questions before the idea of “shrinking the city’s
footprint” was abandoned, made poisonous by the city’s long history of decision
making by and for whites and the powerful.
Desperate to get back into their own homes and rebuild their lives, New
Orleanians were not ready for a drastically different way of thinking about land,
about ownership, about a dramatically reconfigured city, and about a wholly
different role for government in the city’s restoration. If the city did not find a
way to rebuild in a more compact form, some experts warned, New Orleans
would be pocked with “jack ’o lantern” blocks, where only one or two fixed-up
houses would sit lonely in the midst of weed-strangled blocks.
By Katrina’s fifth anniversary, many more people had returned than Rand
had predicted, about 355,000. That’s still 100,000 fewer than pre-Katrina
numbers, and many of those jack ’o lantern streets can now be found.11
With
the city’s budget stretched beyond the breaking point, New Orleanians, in nu-
merous conversations with me in 2010, talked of the need to physically con-
solidate more neighborhoods to kindle greater revitalization. But no one yet
knew how to make that happen.
CONSEQUENCES OF A TRANSACTIONAL LANDSCAPE
Though Katrina placed disaster-rebuilding dilemmas in huge and frightening
light, it is comforting to think that such a disaster could happen in the United
22 | THE LAND

States only once every two or three generations. But climate change and other
environmental challenges may raise the same questions more often, perhaps in
slower motion, and over even larger vulnerable landscapes.
Land development and construction are usually thought of as little more
than economic transactions, but they have unique consequences for a com-
munity. If a business fails, its assets can be transferred to creditors and its em-
ployees can find new jobs. Although a wrenching process, the damage rarely
lasts. The consequences of a building, far more often than not, are permanent:
the rusting hulks of abandoned factories that blight vast tracts of midwestern
cities and ooze pollutants into rivers for decades after they have been shuttered;
the big-box discounter that floods local streets with traffic then later lies aban-
doned behind a vast empty parking lot.
Citymaking through speculative development offers an important effici-
ency: developers succeed when they give people what they want. On the other
hand, consigning the urban future entirely to the vagaries of the real estate mar-
ket has its limitations. Communities rise up when the rules of the market fail
to encourage forms of development that residents find compatible. The market
is not driven to help cities create long-term value. The failures, excesses, and
insults on the landscape of wrong-headed or simply outdated speculative de-
velopment are visible everywhere and have long been decried: the unsanitary
tenements of the nineteenth century that crammed families into buildings de-
prived of sunlight and fresh air; the jury-rigged, opportunistic industrial dis-
tricts of the early twentieth century that belched lung-scorching smoke into the
air and poured offal into once-pristine rivers; the fast-food polyps that metasta-
size then die along the eight-lane arterials of modern suburbia.
A building, even if shoddily made for short-term gain, almost invariably al-
ters the landscape forever. Americans have long tolerated the notion that cor-
porate goals or common accounting practice may generate a useful life of only
a few years. But should we continue to accept the making of throwaway places,
when these private decisions have such profound public consequences?
HOW ATTITUDES TOWARD LAND EVOLVE
The way Americans think about land and property rights can seem immutable,
but attitudes have changed with the times. Just as America has made a tenuous
peace between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian visions of the nation, conflicts be-

tween the rights of individual landowners and the larger public welfare have
frequently landed in court. Old questions are becoming new again in a climate-
change era that calls on us not only to do less harm to the environment but to
restore natural functions on local, regional, and ecosystem scales.
An owner’s cash-gushing strip shopping center is her neighbor’s value-
depriving eyesore. This truism is a simplistic way of illustrating the conflicts en-
demic to land use, which are as old as jurisprudence. Does ownership of the
quarter acre my tract house sits on extend “upward, even to heaven,” as Sir Ed-
ward Coke put it more than 350 years ago?12
Or can your high-rise hotel block
light to the pool deck of my low-rise one? Can a coal company drill a mine un-
derneath my house even if it causes my house to subside? Am I to be denied the
proceeds of the tannery I want to erect even if the smell stings my neighbors’
eyes and the offal pollutes the river we share?13
A nation that at its founding
equated landownership with freedom would predictably be vexed in sorting
out whose interests should prevail.
An enormous percentage of American land-use disputes center on a debate
that was first philosophically engaged in England in the decades preceding the
founding of the United States. Jeremy Bentham argued that the welfare of the
community must take precedence over individual concerns. Adam Smith felt
that the social interest was best served through individual enterprise. It was
Smith’s view that prevailed when the nation was young.14
It is most powerfully
embodied in the clause of the Fifth Amendment cited by Lucas when he made
his “taking” claim.
But the special status that was accorded to private ownership of land
evolved as technological advances and the ever-larger scale of economic sys-
tems conferred on landowners and developers enormous power to change the
landscape—and to create conflicts with neighbors.
As early as 1851, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw articulated the notion that the
free use of land by owners did not include the unlimited right to create nui-
sances for others.15
When the Constitution was written, however, it was not
conceivable that an oil refinery might pop up next to your nice subdivision.
Not surprisingly, in balancing public and private interests, courts saw the stakes
rising as pristine rivers became sewers, thanks to urbanization, and the air over
vast areas was befouled, thanks to industrial processes.
Over decades, the courts increasingly sided with the government’s use of
its “police power” (the power to regulate). It seemed obvious that landowners’
activities that physically or literally injured neighbors (creating a “nuisance”)
24 | THE LAND

could be regulated. But judges also began to permit regulation of activity that
injured or impaired only the economic use or value of others’ land. It was not
always an easy call to make: does a junkyard so reduce a neighbor’s land value
as to constitute a nuisance, calling for interference by government? As land’s
transactional value in a capitalist economy trumped its colonial role as a bul-
wark against serfdom, courts increasingly said yes.
In the twentieth century, courts legitimized an increasing array of regu-
lations as long as they furthered “public welfare”—which gave the government
yet more power over landowners. Yet this narrowing of landowner rights has
been essential to economic growth and to resolving knotty issues presented by
the vast scale and power of modern economic endeavor.
On the one hand, the idea that government could regulate in the welfare in-
terests of all the public allowed officials to prohibit houses of prostitution and
other uses that were thought to imperil the public’s morals. On the other, it
gave a legal basis to zoning, which represented a vast expansion of the govern-
ment’s power to restrict what landowners could do, to the point of telling them
how large a building could be erected on a site and what kinds of uses it could
house. America’s earliest zoning ordinance, the one enacted in New York City
in 1916, even dictated the shape of buildings to ensure daylight for all, giving
the city’s high-rise core a wedding-cake profile—a zigzag skyline that still says
“New York” to people the world over.
One reason that a wide swath of the public welcomed an ever more
complex range of regulations was that many rules (such as separating noxious
industry from genteel residential neighborhoods) had the effect of maintain-
ing or improving the property values of many while aggrieving only a few. Ten-
sions remained between those who benefited from the Benthamesque “public
welfare” regulators, while others wished to return to a purer Adam Smith/
Jeffersonian idea that government should get out of the way.
Neither view has definitively prevailed. We’re taught to think that one’s
house is one’s castle—not to be violated by neighbors or unwarranted govern-
ment intrusion. But the border between our homes and the outside world is far
more pervious today than the image of moat and high walls suggests. You can’t
pull up the drawbridge when you rely on utilities and roads, school systems,
and shopping for the vital needs of everyday life.
We live in a nation that commonly regards ownership as a pure and essen-
tial state, with a substantial bundle of rights that goes along with it. Because
those rights are so powerful, the only way a community can control its destiny

is to push back with an equally powerful and intrusive pile of regulations. One
environmental rule may demand that you maintain natural shrubs and trees
because they shelter a threatened species of bird. Another may require you to
remove the beautiful specimen trees that shade your house because they pro-
vide fuel for wildfires. Some people voluntarily agree to even more constraints
by signing deed restrictions in planned communities. These demand that resi-
dents hew to preselected architectural styles should they choose to remodel.
Today, in other words, your home is your castle as long as its tower does
not extend above the thirty-foot height limit, the color and form of its crenella-
tions are consistent with community-design standards, and you do not intend
to park an RV on the drawbridge. Property-rights activists, who are motivated
by passion, emotion, and righteousness as much as by sober legal analysis,
want to hack back that thicket of land-use regulations to restore the owner’s ex-
ercise of free will in the use and development of land. But such absolutism,
while perhaps delivering a win here or there, is ultimately doomed when our
urban lives are so intimately entangled—as Oregonians learned in a pair of bal-
lot battles over the state’s strict division between urban and rural.
OREGON DRAWS A LINE IN THE SAND
On a characteristically misty Pacific Northwest day, I cruised some streets in
Hillsboro, a suburb west of Portland, where new town houses huddled cheek
by jowl on one side while farm fields stretched into the tree-studded, gently
rolling distance on the other. In the normal American scheme of things, the
next subdivision might have plowed up the peaceful fields. But that has not
been possible at the edge of Hillsboro. In Oregon, you’ll rarely find the isolated
rural subdivisions, golf communities, farmettes, and highway-hugging outlet
malls that pock the exurban outskirts of metropolitan areas.
That’s because Oregon has had a land-use regime since 1973 that strictly
bounds cities, preserving close-in farmlands and forests by drawing urban
growth boundaries around every city, town, and forest hamlet, which forces de-
velopers to look for opportunity in leftover urban and suburban tracts inside
the line rather than bulldozing a rural farm field and hoping a beltway comes
along to connect it to everything else (figure 1.2).16
In a global warming era, Oregon’s strict division between urban and natural
realms is attracting attention. In environmental terms, the contained urban bor-
26 | THE LAND

ders mean less disruption of natural systems by development, fewer roads,
more efficient use of infrastructure investments, and urban areas dense enough
to efficiently support transit. In spite of the ubiquitous misty rains, Portland has
become the capital of cycling obsession. In the future, a more compact form for
cities would mean fewer linear feet of riverfront and beachfront that require
protection from flooding and erosion, and more flexibility to address those that
need protection. More forest acres would store carbon, and fewer forest devel-
opments would require government protection from fires. More acres of intact
natural environment are innately more resilient to the forces of change than are
areas fragmented by diffused urban development.
Earlier than in most places, Portland investors figured out that not every-
one likes to live in subdivisions, and so its downtown is famously lively while
its older neighborhoods and suburbs don’t suffer as much of the creeping stag-
nation that afflicts older neighborhoods in cities such as Phoenix or Houston—
places where it’s easier to move on than to reinvest, and where you see patches
of worn housing or strip development alternating with swaths of weed-grown
Figure 1.2 Oregon’s urban growth boundary draws a clear line between urban, sub-
urban, and town growth zones and agricultural and forestry zones, which permit very
little urban-style development. Credit: © Alex Maclean/Landslides

land unlikely to attract investors. The urban growth boundary is a tool that
works at a scale big enough to make a real difference. A recent Brookings Insti-
tute report put Portland’s carbon footprint at the third lowest in the nation,
smaller than Seattle’s and San Francisco’s, which share such local carbon-saving
qualities as a mild climate and reliance on hydropower.17
The division between urban and rural enjoys wide support and has created
palpable benefits. But it has also attracted vociferous opposition precisely be-
cause Oregonians did something almost unique in America: they took their
land-use future into their own hands.
The abrupt edge between urban and rural drives some people crazy. After
all, land values on the urban side of the growth boundary, where you might
be able to build upward of a half dozen houses every acre, may be many times
those on the rural side, where sometimes only one house is permitted per eighty
acres. Such disparities in value, determined by government fiat, seem unfair
and arbitrary to some, especially to property-rights activists, who have fought
unsuccessfully to overturn Oregon’s urban/rural divide since it was enacted.
In 2004, this simmering anger found its voice in Dorothy English, a
ninety-two-year-old woman who hoped to subdivide some property northwest
of Portland so that her grandchildren could live next door. She was tantaliz-
ingly near the edge of the growth boundary, but because she fell outside it, her
application was denied. In TV ads, she urged support of Ballot Measure 37,
which would require the state to waive property regulations that caused a loss
in value—or else to compensate her for that loss. Few could resist the hard-
working grandmother who was not, after all, seeking to build a retirement city
in precious wilderness. Measure 37 passed overwhelmingly.
The goal of Measure 37, and other property-rights legislation that has found
its way onto ballots in dozens of states, was to broaden the reach of the “tak-
ings” clause of the Fifth Amendment. The argument, as in the Lucas oceanfront
lots case, was that regulations could be considered a government seizure of pri-
vate land as surely as condemnation and forced purchase would be. Measure
37, sold to the electorate as releasing owners from regulatory inflexibility, sub-
stituted a different kind of arbitrariness. Owners were able to make claims for
compensation according to whether their land had been zoned for urban devel-
opment when they bought it. “A lot of land, some of which I’m farming, could
be developed into two-acre or five-acre housing tracts—anything allowed prior
to 1973,” explained David Vanasche, a farmer I visited whose neatly trimmed
grass-seed fields, just a short distance from Hillsboro’s high-tech office parks,
28 | THE LAND

are part of a farming zone that seems to stretch on infinitely. “That will make it
very difficult to farm here.” He pointed out a barely visible furrow that marked
the line between his property and the otherwise identical parcel his neighbor
farmed (figure 1.3). Vanasche’s neighbor filed a claim asking for compensation
or a waiver. He had owned the property long enough that rules permitting a
house per acre had once applied.18
The ultimate result of Measure 37 would
have been to pock one of America’s most productive agricultural landscapes
with blobs and striplets of houses, dictated solely by the rules that had applied
when the land was purchased.
More than seventy-five hundred claims were eventually filed statewide,
many for tracts covering tens of thousands of acres.19
Nor did everyone under-
stand what undoing regulations freed property owners to do: one claim de-
manded a waiver to dig a pumice mine that would deface the Newberry Crater
National Monument.20
The contradictions built into Measure 37 went little discussed in Oregon
prior to passage. With the “remedies” for aggrieved property owners of either
Figure 1.3 Had Oregon ballot measure 37 gone forward, the land to the right of the
street sign, long protected farmland, could have been rezoned for homes, while the land
to the left would have remained protected. Credit: James S. Russell

30 | THE LAND
compensation for their “losses” or waiving the regulatory restrictions that ap-
plied, officials universally opted for waivers. Claims climbed to an estimated
$20 billion, but the cost to localities of assessing, litigating, and making the pay-
ments was also prohibitive.21
Of course, the loss of value, which in many cases
would have to be calculated across decades, was purely guesswork. Faced with
the law’s fiscal consequences and vast impact on forests and farmland, the leg-
islature crafted Measure 49, which made the 1973 development restrictions
slightly less strict. Measure 49 passed as overwhelmingly as Measure 37 had.
Measure 37 should have been seen as nonsensical, but reconciling private
interests and public welfare in terms of land has vexed the nation since its
founding. Understanding what’s at stake in this long-running debate is key
to dynamically adapting to an unpredictable urban future. Property-rights ex-
pert Harvey M. Jacobs, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor, succinctly
explained the roots of this conflict in a presentation at the Lincoln Institute
of Land Policy, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.22
He cited James Madison as an
early advocate for a unique status for private property in American laws and
culture: “Government is instituted no less for the protection of property than
of the persons of individuals.” Jacobs set that view against Benjamin Franklin’s
demurral: “Private property is a creature of society, and is subject to the calls of
the society whenever its necessities require it, even to the last farthing.” The
founders tilted toward Franklin by omission: the Constitution promises “life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” not “life, liberty and property,” as Thomas
Jefferson preferred.
Elevating the status of property as akin to life and liberty wasn’t unrea-
sonable when land was about the only way to create and preserve wealth. But
as cities grew, land values increasingly depended on such external factors as ac-
cess to infrastructure and proximity to customers, and that meant that the
needs of all would inevitably come into more frequent conflict with the desires
of individual owners. A piece of farmland may increase ten times or one hun-
dred times in value when it fronts a brand-new freeway interchange. If some
landowners are entitled to such a benefit, aren’t all landowners? Litigation
erupts when government decides not to extend water and sewer services to
rural tracts. (You need water and sewer to achieve urban densities and, hence,
land values.) The owner feels entitled to the services others enjoy. By contrast,
the larger public interest may be served by controlling urban growth and by
reducing the cost to taxpayers of forcing the expansion of roads and sewers
at the whim of speculators. In some cases, developers have persuaded courts

to require towns to extend urban services, in effect coercing taxpayers to subsi-
dize urban growth that may harm their interests, to put money in an owner’s
pocket.23
In such a confusing mélange of public and private interests, the idea of
landownership as the individual’s bulwark against the incursion of government
seems quaint indeed. We blur the line between private and public ownership
rights all the time, making legal agreements that place owners in partnership
with government, and giving up some rights to gain a government-approved
advantage, such as taking payment for granting an easement that allows a
utility company to string power lines across our tract. We accept a payment
to transfer the right to build subdivisions from our valued farm onto an-
other piece of property that offers a more conducive setting for development.
We accept zoning restrictions that do not allow us to cover all of our lot with a
revenue-generating building. A community may want to protect historic struc-
tures or maintain key wild habitat, so it permits an owner to develop another
portion of a site to a higher intensity in compensation for permitting protection
of the resource the community values.
Though the property-rights absolutists would like to return to what they
view as the Constitution’s first principals, there’s nothing wrong with all the
ways we’ve altered notions of ownership. We realize ourselves, pursue our in-
terests, and create wealth in this way.
Dozens of court cases have failed to draw a clear line between public and
private interests in landownership; nor has Oregon’s civics lesson in property
rights, waged over years through costly election campaigns and lawsuits, done
so. Said Jacobs in a later interview about the state’s ballot issues: “The property-
rights movement was quite successful at getting out its message, which was to
focus on the point at which the government asks too much of the individual in
terms of regulations.” As for rules aimed at cutting carbon emissions: “There is
tremendous potential for fundamental conflict between what appears to be
necessary for the greater good of neighborhoods, cities, and regions and what
individuals think of as their property rights and the protections the constitution
affords them.”24
Oregon’s aggressive goals for carbon emissions were not prominent in
the debates on Measures 37 or 49, but the same battles may be rejoined. “Land-
use planning plays an important role in reaching the greenhouse-gas-reduction
goals the state has set,” Eric Stachon, communication director of the environ-
mental group 1,000 Friends of Oregon, told me at the time.25
Property-rights

32 | THE LAND
activists promise to push back.26
These deeply held views cannot be idly dis-
missed as we seek solutions to problems that must transcend property lines.
On the other hand, neither history nor the courts supports an uncritical defer-
ence to the primacy of ownership rights.
The demonizing of regulation has created widespread sympathy for prop-
erty rights. But communities react—slapping a regulation on something they
don’t like—because they do not take the making of communities into their own
hands. We let speculators do it, then try and contain their worst excesses, which
makes rule making rampant. The trouble with trying to control our urban des-
tiny almost entirely through regulation is that this is not effective in reducing
the most egregious sins of urban growth. Alone, regulations cannot tame traffic.
Environmental rules have barely stemmed the loss of key wild lands.
Many of the most onerous, costly, and difficult-to-enforce regulations
attempt to preserve land that has cultural, ecological, or historic value to the
public. The community can preserve such values by buying land outright or by
condemning it, but the costs of either method are so prohibitive that these tools
can only be successfully used in a limited way. We must learn to be proactive.
TOWARD AGILE OWNERSHIP
The hard, straight lines we draw to mark off the parcels we own have little
to do with the ecosystems they are drawn over: watersheds that may stretch
for dozens of miles in either direction; wildlife-movement corridors, slopes,
streams and bay edges that aren’t static but, unlike property lines, move. A
climate-change era demands we pay closer attention to those natural systems
that flow within and beyond our tidy land divisions. Can we find a similarly
fluid idea of ownership that helps us realize our aspirations yet is mindful of
the natural world we all share?
That means yet again rearranging the owner’s relationship with the pub-
lic’s welfare—a task that makes many Americans uncomfortable. In most of the
world, it is taken for granted that government will hold significant power over
land use and will wield these powers to advance the greater public good. Ar-
mando Carbonell, chair of the Department of Planning and Urban Form at the
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, describes “a spectrum of approaches” world-
wide to private-property rights. Clear ownership rights are essential in capital-
ist countries, but in much of the world, he said in a telephone conversation,

“there is no sacredness of private development rights.” In the United King-
dom, for example, any development must seek planning permission: “There is
no ‘right’ to develop,” Carbonell explained. “The northern European model
is that government largely decides where you do what with your land.”27
Hol-
land’s elaborate flood defenses come from centralized decision making because
without government intervention to keep out the North Sea in this low-lying
country, no development at all is possible. This has translated into a culture of
intensively planned and organized development that is neat, orderly, conven-
ient, and relatively low cost. Dutch people also appreciate, as one acquaintance
put it, “knowing exactly what will be next door.”
In most other countries, some kind of local planning authority is sup-
posed to defuse land-use disputes by laying out master plans for growth. The
plans put housing to the west, along the commuter-rail line, and shopping and
offices near the central station. Such agencies typically control infrastructure-
construction purse strings as well. You can’t put your office park on any piece
of land outside town, because the authority will not build a road to it and can
refuse to issue building permission in any event. You’ll have to put it on land
near the train line, so workers can commute without driving.
This is not to say that we need to adopt a Dutch or Nordic model. These
models illustrate that people happily live and realize their dreams in places with
very different approaches to ownership and government involvement in land
development—and where costly land disputes do not endlessly tie up courts.
The concept of such strong planning powers is unassailable: the planner
will synthesize expert opinion and the people’s will, giving the community a
proactive voice in the way it grows and revitalizes. The United States, with its
historic distrust of government, has never had much faith in city planning or in
master plans assembled by experts, and it has tended to abandon planning with
teeth in the face of failure—as in the massive “slum clearances” of the 1950s
and 1960s—rather than trying to plan more fairly and effectively.
Critics have long said that planning agencies lacked the expertise, the
acumen, and the private sector’s profit motive and therefore should not be bet-
ting the public’s money on a speculative future. So most US cities react, throw-
ing money at an industry that promises to move in and create jobs, or building
the latest urban bauble (aquarium, sports stadium, museum) that is thought to
confer (inevitably) a “world-class” edge. The one-offs rarely pay. Regulations,
not to mention subsidies, targeted tax benefits, and other government actions,
are also bets on the future, entailing exactly the same risks as planning. As in

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Old Judge
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you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Old Judge Priest
Author: Irvin S. Cobb
Release date: November 18, 2013 [eBook #44224]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD JUDGE
PRIEST ***

By Irvin S. Cobb
New York George H. Doran Company
Copyright, 1918
CONTENTS
OLD JUDGE PRIEST
I. THE LORD PROVIDES
II. A BLENDING OF THE PARABLES
III. JUDGE PRIEST COMES BACK
IV. A CHAPTER FROM THE LIFE OF AN ANT
V. SERGEANT JIMMY BAGBY'S FEET
VI. ACCORDING TO THE CODE
VII. FORREST'S LAST CHARGE
VIII. DOUBLE-BARRELLED JUSTICE
IX. A BEAUTIFUL EVENING *

T
I. THE LORD PROVIDES
HIS story begins with Judge Priest sitting at his desk at his
chambers at the old courthouse. I have a suspicion that it will
end with him sitting there. As to that small detail I cannot at
this time be quite positive. Man proposes, but facts will have
their way.
If so be you have read divers earlier tales of my telling you
already know the setting for the opening scene here. You are to
picture first the big bare room, high-ceiled and square of shape, its
plastering cracked and stained, its wall cases burdened with law
books in splotched leather jerkins; and some of the books stand
straight and upright, showing themselves to be confident of the
rectitude of all statements made therein, and some slant over
sideways against their fellows to the right or the left, as though
craving confirmatory support for their contents.
Observe also the water bucket on the little shelf in the corner, with
the gourd dipper hanging handily by; the art calendar, presented
with the compliments of the Langstock Lumber Company, tacked
against the door; the spittoon on the floor; the steel engraving of
President Davis and his Cabinet facing you as you enter; the two
wide windows opening upon the west side of the square; the
woodwork, which is of white poplar, but grained by old Mr. Kane, our
leading house, sign and portrait painter, into what he reckoned to be
a plausible imitation of the fibrillar eccentricities of black walnut; and
in the middle of all this, hunched down behind his desk like a
rifleman in a pit, is Judge Priest, in a confusing muddle of broad,
stooped shoulders, wrinkled garments and fat short legs.
Summertime would have revealed him clad in linen, or alpaca, or
ample garments of homespun hemp, but this particular day, being a
day in the latter part of October, Judge Priest's limbs and body were
clothed in woollen coverings. The first grate fire of the season

burned in his grate. There was a local superstition current to the
effect that our courthouse was heated with steam. Years before, a
bond issue to provide the requisite funds for this purpose had been
voted after much public discussion pro and con. Thereafter, for a
space, contractors and journeymen artisans made free of the
building, to the great discomfort of certain families of resident rats,
old settler rats really, that had come to look upon their cozy habitats
behind the wainscoting as homes for life. Anon iron pipes emerged
at unexpected and jutting angles from the baseboards here and
there, to coil in the corners or else to climb the walls, joint upon
joint, and festoon themselves kinkily against the ceilings.
Physically the result was satisfying to the eye of the taxpayer; but
if the main function of a heating plant be to provide heat, then the
innovation might hardly be termed an unqualified success. Official
dwellers of the premises maintained that the pipes never got really
hot to the touch before along toward the Fourth of July, remaining
so until September, when they began perceptibly to cool off again.
Down in the cellar the darky janitor might feed the fire box until his
spine cracked and the boilers seethed and simmered, but the steam
somehow seemed to get lost in transit, manifesting itself on the
floors above only in a metallic clanking and clacking, which had been
known seriously to annoy lawyers in the act of offering argument to
judge and jurors. When warmth was needed to dispel the chill in his
own quarters Judge Priest always had a fire kindled in the fireplace.
He had had one made and kindled that morning. All day the red
coals had glowed between the chinks in the pot-bellied grate and the
friendly flames had hummed up the flue, renewing neighbourly
acquaintance with last winter's soot that made fringes on the
blackened fire brick, so that now the room was in a glow. Little tiaras
of sweat beaded out on the judge's bald forehead as he laboured
over the papers in a certain case, and frequently he laid down his
pen that he might use both hands, instead of his left only, to reach
and rub remote portions of his person. Doing this, he stretched his
arms until red strips showed below the ends of his wristbands. At a
distance you would have said the judge was wearing coral bracelets.

The sunlight that had streamed in all afternoon through the two
windows began to fade, and little shadows that stayed hidden
through the day crawled under the door from the hall beyond and
crept like timorous mice across the planking, ready to dart back the
moment the gas was lit. Judge Priest strained to reach an especially
itchy spot between his shoulder blades and addressed words to Jeff
Poindexter, coloured, his body servant and house boy.
“They ain't so very purty to look at—red flannels ain't,” said the
judge. “But, Jeff, I've noticed this—they certainly are mighty lively
company till you git used to 'em. I never am the least bit lonely fur
the first few days after I put on my heavy underwear.”
There was no answer from Jeff except a deep, soft breath. He
slept. At a customary hour he had come with Mittie May, the white
mare, and the buggy to take Judge Priest home to supper, and had
found the judge engaged beyond his normal quitting time. That,
however, had not discommoded Jeff. Jeff always knew what to do
with his spare moments. Jeff always had a way of spending the long
winter evenings. He leaned now against a bookrack, with his elbow
on the top shelf, napping lightly. Jeff preferred to sleep lying down
or sitting down, but he could sleep upon his feet too—and frequently
did.
Having, by brisk scratching movements, assuaged the irritation
between his shoulder blades, the judge picked up his pen and
shoved it across a sheet of legal cap that already was half covered
with his fine, close writing. He never dictated his decisions, but
always wrote them out by hand. The pen nib travelled along steadily
for awhile. Eventually words in a typewritten petition that rested on
the desk at his left caught the judge's eye.
“Huh!” he grunted, and read the quoted phrase, “'True Believers'
Afro-American Church of Zion, sometimes called——'” Without
turning his head he again hailed his slumbering servitor: “Jeff, why
do yourall call that there little church-house down by the river
Possum Trot?”

Jeff roused and grunted, shaking his head dear of the lingering
dregs of drowsiness.
“Suh?” he inquired. “Wuz you speakin' to me, Jedge?”
“Yes, I was. Whut's the reason amongst your people fur callin' that
little church down on the river front Possum Trot?”
Jeff chuckled an evasive chuckle before he made answer. For all
the close relations that existed between him and his indulgent
employer, Jeff had no intention of revealing any of the secrets of the
highly secretive breed of humans to which he belonged. His is a race
which, upon the surface of things, seems to invite the ridicule of an
outer and a higher world, yet dreads that same ridicule above all
things. Show me the white man who claims to know intimately the
workings of his black servant's mind, who professes to be able to tell
anything of any negro's lodge affiliations or social habits or private
affairs, and I will show you a born liar.
Mightily well Jeff understood the how and the why and the
wherefore of the derisive hate borne by the more orthodox creeds
among his people for the strange new sect known as the True
Believers. He could have traced out step by step, with circumstantial
detail, the progress of the internal feud within the despised
congregation that led to the upspringing of rival sets of claimants to
the church property, and to the litigation that had thrown the whole
tangled business into the courts for final adjudication. But except in
company of his own choosing and his own colour, wild horses could
not have drawn that knowledge from Jeff, although it would have
pained him to think any white person who had a claim upon his
friendship suspected him of concealment of any detail whatsoever.
“He-he,” chuckled Jeff. “I reckin that's jes' nigger foolishness. Me,
I don' know no reason why they sh'd call a church by no sech a
name as that. I ain't never had no truck wid 'em ole True Believers,
myse'f. I knows some calls 'em the Do-Righters, and some calls 'em
the Possum Trotters.” His tone subtly altered to one of innocent
bewilderment: “Whut you doin', Jedge, pesterin' yo'se'f wid sech
low-down trash as them darkies is?”

Further discussion of the affairs of the strange faith that was
divided against itself might have ensued but that an interruption
came. Steps sounded in the long hallway that split the lower floor of
the old courthouse lengthwise, and at a door—not Judge Priest's
own door but the door of the closed circuit-court chamber adjoining
—a knocking sounded, at first gently, then louder and more
insistent.
“See who 'tis out yonder, Jeff,” bade Judge Priest. “And ef it's
anybody wantin' to see me I ain't got time to see 'em without it's
somethin' important. I aim to finish up this job before we go on
home.”
He bent to his task again. But a sudden draft of air whisked
certain loose sheets off his desk, carrying them toward the fireplace,
and he swung about to find a woman in his doorway. She was a big,
upstanding woman, overfleshed and overdressed, and upon her face
she bore the sign of her profession as plainly and indubitably as
though it had been branded there in scarlet letters.
The old man's eyes narrowed as he recognised her. But up he got
on the instant and bowed before her. No being created in the image
of a woman ever had reason to complain that in her presence Judge
Priest forgot his manners.
“Howdy do, ma'am,” he said ceremoniously. “Will you walk in? I'm
sort of busy jest at present.”
“That's what your nigger boy told me, outside,” she said; “but I
came right on in any-way.
“Ah-hah, so I observe,” stated Judge Priest dryly, but none the less
politely; “mout I enquire the purpose of this here call?”
“Yes, sir; I'm a-goin' to tell you what brought me here without
wastin' any more words than I can help,” said the woman. “No,
thank you,' Judge,” she went on as he motioned her toward a seat;
“I guess I can say what I've got to say, standin' up. But you set
down, please, Judge.”!
She advanced to the side of his desk as he settled back in his
chair, and rested one broad flat hand upon the desk top. Three or

four heavy, bejewelled bangles that were on her arm slipped down
her gloved wrist with a clinking sound. Her voice was coarsened and
flat; it was more like a man's voice than a woman's, and she spoke
with a masculine directness.
“There was a girl died at my house early this mornin',” she told
him. “She died about a quarter past four o'clock. She had something
like pneumonia. She hadn't been sick but two days; she wasn't very
strong to start with anyhow. Viola St. Claire was the name she went
by here. I don't know what her real name was—she never told
anybody what it was. She wasn't much of a hand to talk about
herself. She must have been nice people though, because she was
always nice and ladylike, no matter what happened. From what I
gathered off and on, she came here from some little town down
near Memphis. I certainly liked that girl. She'd been with me nearly
ten months. She wasn't more than nineteen years old.
“Well, all day yestiddy she was out of her head with a high fever.
But just before she died she come to and her mind cleared up. The
doctor was gone—old Doctor Lake. He'd done all he could for her
and he left for his home about midnight, leavin' word that he was to
be called if there was any change. Only there wasn't time to call
him; it all came so sudden.
“I was settin' by her when she opened her eyes and whispered,
sort of gaspin', and called me by my name. Well, you could 'a'
knocked me down with a feather. From the time she started sinkin'
nobody thought she'd ever get her senses back. She called me, and
I leaned over her and asked her what it was she wanted, and she
told me. She knew she was dyin'. She told me she'd been raised
right, which I knew already without her tellin' me, and she said she'd
been a Christian girl before she made her big mistake. And she told
me she wanted to be buried like a Christian, from a regular church,
with a sermon and flowers and music and all that. She made me
promise that I'd see it was done just that way. She made me put my
hand in her hand and promise her. She shut her eyes then, like she
was satisfied, and in a minute or two after that she died, still holdin'

on tight to my hand. There wasn't nobody else there—just me and
her—and it was about a quarter past four o'clock in the mornin'.”
“Well, ma'am, I'm very sorry for that poor child. I am so,” said
Judge Priest, and his tone showed he meant it; “yit still I don't
understand your purpose in comin' to me, without you need money
to bury her.” His hand went toward his flank, where he kept his
wallet.
“Keep your hand out of your pocket, please, sir,” said the woman.
“I ain't callin' on anybody for help in a money way. That's all been
attended to. I telephoned the undertaker the first thing this mornin'.
“It's something else I wanted to speak with you about. Well, I
didn't hardly wait to get my breakfast down before I started off to
keep my word to Viola. And I've been on the constant go ever since.
I've rid miles on the street cars, and I've walked afoot until the
bottoms of my feet both feel like boils right this minute, tryin' to find
somebody that was fitten to preach a sermon over that dead girl.
“First I made the rounds of the preachers of all the big churches.
Doctor Cavendar was my first choice; from what I've heard said
about him he's a mighty good man. But he ain't in town. His wife
told me he'd gone off to district conference, whatever that is. So
then I went to all the others, one by one. I even went 'way up on
Alabama Street—to that there little mission church in the old Acme
rink. The old man that runs the mission—I forget his name—he does
a heap of work among poor people and down-and-out people, and I
guess he might've said yes, only he's right bad off himself. He's sick
in bed.”
She laughed mirthlessly.
“Oh, I went everywhere, I went to all of 'em. There was one or
two acted like they was afraid I might soil their clothes if I got too
close to 'em. They kept me standin' in the doors of their studies so
as they could talk back to me from a safe distance. Some of the
others, though, asked me inside and treated me decent. But they
every last one of 'em said no.”

“Do you mean to tell me that not a single minister in this whole
city is willin' to hold a service over that dead girl?” Judge Priest
shrilled at her with vehement astonishment—and something else—in
his voice.
“No, no, not that,” the woman made haste to explain. “There
wasn't a single one of 'em but said he'd come to my house and
conduct the exercises. They was all willin' enough to go to the grave
too. But you see that wouldn't do. I explained to 'em, until I almost
lost my voice, that it had to be a funeral in a regular church, with
flowers and music and all. That poor girl got it into her mind
somehow, I think, that she'd have a better chance in the next world
if she went out of this one like a Christian should ought to go. I
explained all that to 'em, and from explainin' I took to arguin' with
'em, and then to pleadin' and beggin'. I bemeaned myself before
them preachers. I was actually ready to go down on my knees
before 'em.
“Oh, I told 'em the full circumstances. I told 'em I just had to keep
my promise. I'm afraid not to keep it. I've lived my own life in my
own way and I guess I've got a lot of things to answer for. I ain't
worryin' about that—now. But you don't dare to break a promise
that's made to the dyin'. They come back and ha'nt you. I've always
heard that and I know it's true.
“One after another I told those preachers just exactly how it was,
but still they all said no. Every one of 'em said his board of deacons
or elders or trustees, or something like that, wouldn't stand for
openin' up their church for Viola. I always thought a preacher could
run his church to suit himself, but from what I've heard to-day I
know now he takes his orders from somebody else. So finally, when
I was about to give up, I thought about you and I come here as
straight as I could walk.”
“But, ma'am,” he said, “I'm not a regular church member myself. I
reckin I oughter be, but I ain't. And I still fail to understand why you
should think I could serve you, though I don't mind tellin' you I'd be
mighty glad to ef I could.”

“I'll tell you why. I never spoke to you but once before in my life,
but I made up my mind then what kind of a man you was. Maybe
you don't remember it, Judge, but two years ago this comin'
December that there Law and Order League fixed up to run me out
of this town. They didn't succeed, but they did have me indicted by
the Grand Jury, and I come up before you and pleaded guilty—they
had the evidence on me all right. You fined me, you fined me the
limit, and I guess if I hadn't 'a' had the money to pay the fine I'd 'a'
gone to jail. But the main point with me was that you treated me
like a lady.
“I know what I am good and well, but I don't like to have
somebody always throwin' it up to me. I've got feelin's the same as
anybody else has. You made that little deputy sheriff quit shovin' me
round and you called me Mizzis Cramp to my face, right out in court.
I've been Old Mallie Cramp to everybody in this town so long I'd
mighty near forgot I ever had a handle on my name, until you
reminded me of it. You was polite to me and decent to me, and you
acted like you was sorry to see a white woman fetched up in court,
even if you didn't say it right out. I ain't forgot that. I ain't ever goin'
to forget it. And awhile ago, when I was all beat out and
discouraged, I said to myself that if there was one man left in this
town who could maybe help me to keep my promise to that dead
girl, Judge William Pitman Priest was the man. That's why I'm here.”
“I'm sorry, ma'am, sorry fur you and sorry fur that dead child,”
said Judge Priest slowly. “I wish I could help you. I wish I knew how
to advise you. But I reckin those gentlemen were right in whut they
said to you to-day. I reckin probably their elders would object to
them openin' up their churches, under the circumstances. And I'm
mightily afraid I ain't got any influence I could bring to bear in any
quarter. Did you go to Father Minor? He's a good friend of mine; we
was soldiers together in the war—him and me. Mebbe—”
“I thought of him,” said the woman hopelessly; “but you see,
Judge, Viola didn't belong to his church. She was raised a Protestant,
she told me so. I guess he couldn't do nothin'.” in.

“Ah-hah, I see,” said the judge, and in his perplexity he bent his
head and rubbed his broad expanse of pink bald brow fretfully, as
though to stimulate thought within by friction without. His left hand
fell into the litter of documents upon his desk. Absently his fingers
shuffled them back and forth under his eyes. He straightened
himself alertly.
“Was it stated—was it specified that a preacher must hold the
funeral service over that dead girl?” he inquired.
The woman caught eagerly at the inflection that had come into his
voice.
“No, sir,” she answered; “all she said was that it must be in a
church and with some flowers and some music. But I never heard of
anybody preachin' a regular sermon without it was a regular
preacher. Did you ever, Judge?” Doubt and renewed disappointment
battered at her just-born hopes.
“I reckin mebbe there have been extraordinary occasions where
an amateur stepped in and done the best he could,” said the judge.
“Mebbe some folks here on earth couldn't excuse sech presumption
as that, but I reckin they'd understand how it was up yonder.”
He stood up, facing her, and spoke as one making a solemn
promise:
“Ma'am, you needn't worry yourself any longer. You kin go on back
to your home. That dead child is goin' to have whut she asked for. I
give you my word on it.”
She strove to put a question, but he kept on: “I ain't prepared to
give you the full details yit. You see I don't know myself jest exactly
whut they'll be. But inside of an hour from now I'll be seein' Jansen
and he'll notify you in regards to the hour and the place and the rest
of it. Kin you rest satisfied with that?”
She nodded, trying to utter words and not succeeding. Emotion
shook her gross shape until the big gold bands on her arms jangled
together.
“So, ef you'll kindly excuse me, I've got quite a number of things
to do betwixt now and suppertime. I kind of figger I'm goin' to be

right busy.”
He stepped to the threshold and called out down the hallway,
which by now was a long, dim tunnel of thickening shadows.
“Jeff, oh Jeff, where are you, boy?”
“Comin', Jedge.”
The speaker emerged from the gloom that was only a few shades
darker than himself.
“Jeff,” bade his master, “I want you to show this lady the way out
—it's black as pitch in that there hall. And, Jeff, listen here! When
you've done that I want you to go and find the sheriff fur me. Ef he's
left his office—and I s'pose he has by now—you go on out to his
house, or wherever he is, and find him and tell him I want to see
him here right away.”
He swung his ponderous old body about and bowed with a homely
courtesy:
“And now I bid you good night, ma'am.” At the cross sill of the
door she halted: “Judge—about gettin' somebody to carry the coffin
in and out—did you think about that? She was such a little thing—
she won't be very heavy—but still, at that, I don't know anybody—
any men—that would be willin'——”
“Ma'am,” said Judge Priest gravely, “ef I was you I wouldn't worry
about who the pallbearers will be. I reckin the Lord will provide. I've
took notice that He always does ef you'll only meet Him halfway.”
For a fact the judge was a busy man during the hour which
followed upon all this, the hour between twilight and night. Over the
telephone he first called up M. Jansen, our leading undertaker;
indeed at that time our only one, excusing the coloured undertaker
on Locust Street. He had converse at length with M. Jansen. Then
he called up Doctor Lake, a most dependable person in sickness, and
when you were in good health too. Then last of all he called up a
certain widow who lived in those days, Mrs. Matilda Weeks by name;
and this lady was what is commonly called, a character. In her case
the title was just and justified. Of character she had more than
almost anybody I ever knew.

Mrs. Weeks didn't observe precedents. She made them. She cared
so little for following after public opinion that public opinion usually
followed alter her—when it had recovered from the shock and
reorganised itself. There were two sides to her tongue: for some a
sharp and acid side, and then again for some a sweet and gentle
side—and mainly these last were the weak and the erring and the
shiftless, those underfoot and trodden down. Moving through this
life in a calm, deliberative, determined way, always along paths of
her making and her choosing, obeying only the beck of her own
mind, doing good where she might, with a perfect disregard for what
the truly good might think about it, Mrs. Weeks was daily guilty of
acts that scandalised all proper people. But the improper ones
worshipped the ground her feet touched as she walked. She was
much like that disciple of Joppa named Tabitha, which by
interpretation is called Dorcas, of whom it is written that she was full
of good works and almsdeeds which she did. Yes, you might safely
call Mrs. Weeks a character.
With her, back and forth across the telephone wire, Judge Priest
had extended speech. Then he hung up the receiver and went home
alone to a late and badly burnt supper. Aunt Dilsey Turner, the titular
goddess of his kitchen, was a queen cook among cooks, but she
could keep victuals hot without scorching them for just so long and
no longer. She took pains to say as much, standing in the dining-
room door with her knuckles on her hips. But the judge didn't pay
much attention to Aunt Dilsey's vigorous remarks. He had other
things on his mind.
Down our way this present generation has seen a good many
conspicuous and prominent funerals. Until very recently we rather
specialised in funerals. Before moving pictures sprang up so
numerously funerals provided decorous and melancholy
divertisement for many whose lives, otherwise, were rather aridly
devoid of sources of inexpensive excitement. Among us were
persons—old Mrs. Whitridge was a typical example—who hadn't
missed a funeral of any consequence for years and years back. Let
some one else provide the remains, and they would assemble in

such number as to furnish a gathering, satisfying in its size and
solemn in its impressiveness. They took the run of funerals as they
came. But there were some funerals which, having taken place,
stood forth in the public estimation forever after as events to be
remembered. They were mortuary milestones on the highway of
community life.
For instance, those who were of suitable age to attend it are never
going to forget the burial that the town gave lazy, loud-mouthed
Lute Montjoy, he being the negro fireman on the ferryboat who
jumped into the river that time, aiming to save the small child of a
Hungarian immigrant family bound for somewhere up in the
Cumberland on the steamer Goldenrod. The baby ran across the
boiler deck and went overboard, and the mother screamed, and Lute
saw what had happened and he jumped. He was a good swimmer all
right, and in half a dozen strokes he reached the strangling mite in
the water; but then the current caught him—the June rise was on—
and sucked him downstream into the narrow, swirling place between
the steamboat's hull and the outside of the upper wharf boat, and
he went under and stayed under.
Next morning when the dragnets caught and brought him up, one
of his stiffened black arms still encircled the body of the white child,
in a grip that could hardly be loosened. White and black, everybody
turned out to bury Lute Montjoy. In the services at the church two of
the leading clergymen assisted, turn and turn about; and at the
graveside Colonel Horatio Farrell, dean of the local bar and the
champion orator of seven counties, delivered an hour-long oration,
calling Lute by such names as Lute, lying there cased in mahogany
with silver trimmings, had never heard applied to him while he lived.
Popular subscription provided the fund that paid for the stone to
mark his grave and to perpetuate the memory of his deed. You can
see the shaft to this day. It rises white and high among the trees in
Elm Grove Cemetery, and the word Hero is cut deep in its marble
face.
Then there was the funeral of old Mr. Simon Leatheritt, mightiest
among local financiers. That, indeed, was a funeral to be cherished

in the cranial memory casket of any person so favoured by fortune
as to have been present; a funeral that was felt to be a credit alike
to deceased and to bereaved; a funeral that by its grandeur would
surely have impressed the late and, in a manner of speaking,
lamented Leatheritt, even though its cost would have panged him; in
short, an epoch-making and an era-breeding funeral.
In the course of a long married career this was the widow's first
opportunity to cut loose and spend money without having to account
for it by dollar, by dime and by cent to a higher authority, and she
certainly did cut loose, sparing absolutely no pains in the effort to do
her recent husband honour. At a cost calculated as running into
three figures for that one item alone, she imported the prize male
tenor of a St. Louis cathedral choir to enrich the proceedings with his
glowing measures. This person, who was a person with eyes too
large for a man and a mouth too small, rendered Abide With Me in a
fashion so magnificent that the words were entirely indistinguishable
and could not be followed on account of the genius' fashion of
singing them.
By express, floral offerings came from as far away as Cleveland,
Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana. One creation, sent on from a far
distance, which displayed a stuffed white dove hovering, with the aid
of wires, in the arc of a green trellis above a bank of white
tuberoses, attracted much favourable comment. A subdued murmur
of admiration, travelling onward from pew to pew, followed after it
as the design was borne up the centre aisle to the chancel rail.
As for broken columns and flower pillows with appropriately
regretful remarks let into them in purple immortelle letterings, and
gates ajar—why, they were evident in a profusion almost past
individual recording.
When the officiating minister, reading the burial service, got as far
as “Dust to dust,” Ashby Corwin, who sat at the back of the church,
bent over and whispered in the ear of his nearest neighbour: “Talk
about your ruling passions! If that's not old Uncle Sime all over—still
grabbing for the dust!” As a rule, repetition of this sally about town
was greeted with the deep hush of silent reproof. Our dead money-

monarch's memory was draped with the sanctity of wealth. Besides,
Ash Corwin, as many promptly took pains to point out, was a person
of no consequence whatsoever, financial or otherwise. Mrs.
Whitridge's viewpoint, as voiced by her in the months that followed,
was the commoner one. This is Mrs. Whitridge speaking:
“I've been going to funerals steady ever since I was a child, I
presume I've helped comfort more berefts by my presence and seen
more dear departeds fittin'ly laid away than any person in this whole
city. But if you're asking me, I must say Mr. Leatheritt's was the most
fashionable funeral I ever saw, or ever hope to see. Everything that
lavishness could do was done there, and all in such lovely taste, too!
Why, it had style written all over it, especially the internment.”
Oh, we've had funerals and funerals down our way. But the funeral
that took place on an October day that I have in mind still will be
talked about long after Banker Leatheritt and the estate he
reluctantly left behind him are but dim recollections. It came as a
surprise to most people, for in the daily papers of that morning no
customary black-bordered announcement had appeared. Others had
heard of it by word of mouth. In dubious quarters, and in some
quarters not quite so dubious, the news had travelled, although
details in advance of the event were only to be guessed at. Anyhow,
the reading and talking public knew this much: That a girl, calling
herself Viola St. Claire and aged nineteen, had died. It was an
accepted fact, naturally, that even the likes of her must be laid away
after some fashion or other. If she were put under ground by stealth,
clandestinely as it were, so much the better for the atmosphere of
civic morality. That I am sure would have been disclosed as the
opinion of a majority, had there been inquiry among those who were
presumed to have and who admitted they had the best interests of
the community at heart.
So you see a great many people were entirely unprepared against
the coming of the pitiably short procession that at eleven o'clock, or
thereabout, turned out of the little street running down back of the
freight depot into Franklin Street, which was one of our main
thoroughfares. First came the hearse, drawn by M. Jansen's pair of

dappled white horses and driven by M. Jansen himself, he wearing
his official high hat and the span having black plumes in their head
stalls, thus betokening a burial ceremony of the top cost. Likewise
the hearse was M. Jansen's best hearse—not his third best, nor yet
his second best, but the splendid crystal-walled one that he ordered
in the Eastern market after the relict of Banker Leatheritt settled the
bill.
The coffin, showing through the glass sides, was of white cloth
and it looked very small, almost like a coffin for a child. However, it
may have looked so because there was little of its shape to be seen.
It was covered and piled and banked up with flowers, and these
flowers, strange to say, were not done into shapes of gates aswing;
nor into shafts with their tops gone; nor into flat, stiff pillows of
waxy-white tuberoses, pale and cold as the faces of the dead. These
were such flowers as, in our kindly climate, grew out of doors until
well on into November: late roses and early chrysanthemums,
marigolds and gladioluses, and such. They lay there loosely, with
their stems upon them, just as Mrs. Weeks had sheared them,
denuding every plant and shrub and bush that grew in her garden,
so a girl whom Mrs. Weeks had never seen might go to her grave
with an abundance of the blossoms she had coveted about her.
Behind the hearse came a closed coach. We used to call them
coaches when they figured in funerals, carriages when used for
lodge turnouts, and plain hacks when they met the trains and boats.
In the coach rode four women. The world at large had a way of
calling them painted women; but this day their faces were not
painted nor were they garishly clad. For the time they were merely
women—neither painted women nor fallen women—but just women.
And that was nearly all, but not quite. At one side of the hearse,
opposite the slowly turning front wheels, trudged Judge Priest,
carrying in the crook of one bent arm a book. It wouldn't be a law
book, for they commonly are large books, bound in buff leather, and
this book was small and flat and black in colour. On the other side of
the hearse, with head very erect and eyes fixed straight ahead and

Sunday's best coat buttoned tightly about his sparse frame, walked
another old man, Doctor Lake.
And that was all. At least that was all at first. But as the
procession—if you could call it that—swung into Franklin Street it
passed by The Blue Jug Saloon and Short Order Restaurant. In the
doorway here lounged Perry Broadus, who drank. The night before
had been a hard night upon Perry Broadus, whose nights always
were hard, and it promised to be a hard day. He shivered at the
touch of the clear, crisp air upon his flushed cheek and slanted for
support against a handy doorpost of the Blue Jug. The hearse
turned the corner, and he stared at it a moment and understood. He
straightened his slouched shoulders, and the fog left his eyes and
the fumes of staling alcohol quit his brain. He pulled off his hat,
twisted his wreck of a necktie straight with a hand that shook and,
cold sober, he ran out and caught step behind Judge Priest.
Referring to pallbearers, Judge Priest had said the Lord would
provide. But Perry Broadus provided himself.
I forget now who the next volunteer was, but I think possibly it
was Sergeant Jimmy Bagby. Without waiting to analyse the emotions
that possessed him in the first instant of realisation, the sergeant
went hurrying into the road to fall in, and never thereafter had cause
to rue his impulse, his one regret being that he had no warning, else
he would have slipped on his old, grey uniform coat that he reserved
for high occasions. I know that Mr. Napoleon B. Crump, who was
active in church and charities, broke away from two ladies who were
discussing parish affairs with him upon the sidewalk in front of his
wholesale grocery, and with never a word of apology to them slipped
into line, with Doctor Lake for his file leader. A moment later, hearing
footfalls at his back, Mr. Crump looked over his shoulder. Beck
Giltner, a man whom Mr. Crump had twice tried to have driven out of
town and whom he yet hoped to see driven out of town, was
following, two paces behind him.
I know that Mr. Joe Plumm came, shirtsleeved, out of his cooper
shop and sought a place with the others. I know that Major Fair-
leigh, who had been standing idly at the front window of his law

office, emerged therefrom in such haste he forgot to bring his hat
with him. Almost immediately the Major became aware that he was
sandwiched in between the fat chief of the paid fire department and
worthless Tip Murphy, who hadn't been out of the penitentiary a
month. I know that old Peter J. Galloway, the lame Irish blacksmith,
wore his leather apron as he limped along, bobbing up on his good
leg and down on his short bent one.
I know that Mr. Herman Felsburg brought with him four of the
clerks of Felsburg Brothers' Oak Hall Clothing Emporium. One of
them left a customer behind, too, or possibly the customer also
came. On second thought, I believe he did. I know that some men
stood along the curbstones and stared and that other men, having
first bared their heads, broke away to tail in at the end of the
doubled lines of marching figures. And I know that of those who did
this there were more than of those who merely stood and stared.
The padding of shoe soles upon the gravel of the street became a
steadily increasing, steadily rising thump-thump-thump; the rhythm
of it rose above the creak and the clatter of the hearse wheels and
the hoofs of the horses.
Lengthened and strengthened every few feet and every few yards
by the addition of new recruits, the procession kept on. It trailed
past shops and stores and jobbers' houses. It travelled by the Y. M.
C. A. and by Fraternity Hall. It threaded its way between rows of
residences. It must have been two hundred strong when the hearse
horses came abreast of that stately new edifice, with its fine
memorial windows and its tall twin spires, which the darkies called
the Big Rock Church. They didn't stop here though. Neither did they
stop at the old ivy-covered' church farther along nor at the little red-
brick church in the middle of the next block.
The procession kept on. Growing and still growing, it kept on. By
now you might have counted in its ranks fit representatives of every
grade and class, every cult and every creed to be found in the male
population of our town. Old men and young men marched;
bachelors and heads of families; rich men and poor; men who made
public sentiment and men who defied it; strict churchgoers and

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