North American Cities: Deep Down Things

IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME

In many of the inner cities of North America and throughout the West, from about 1890 to 1920, there was what is now called a 'golden age' in the history of city architecture. During this period the central core of a great number of cities was invigorated, given a fresh, a stimulating, exterior. After the years of decline of this core, what is often called the central business district, from about 1950/60 to 1980/90, these CBDs were reinvigorated in many places. Entertainment, fantasy, a new commercial leisure culture began to occupy the central squares. This was happening all over the world during the fin de siecle and now in this new century. Part of the plan, the central assumptions, the raison d'etre, behind this architectural and leisure culture renewal has been: if you build it they will come. In Haifa this same process has been at work, for fifteen years and perhaps much longer, a process in which an 'exquisite power,' a grace 'so contained as to pose no threat,' has found a home, a 'crystal concentrate of beauty.' It has now been built and they are coming.
-Ron Price with thanks to Roger White, "The Artifact," The Witness of Pebbles, George Ronald, Oxford, 1981, p.97.

Faithful to the memory of that appointed hour
which he'd assigned so long ago to that design;
we have set her in that place of honour
in the central square;
we find, but hardly know,
the exquisite power
which she one day will wield;
'tis dismissed as fantasy by the solemn elders
and, of course, in history's court,
among the present cognoscenti,
all is arguable, they may be right.
For who can doubt their knowing ways.

Now she lay there and we grow accustomed
to this wondrous crystal concentrate of beauty,
as the eye `does to any artefact.
We marvel, but we easily forget
in our troubled days
while our cities are swept
with confused alarms
and our feet hardly feel, being shod.

But my heart says this beauty will not be spent.
Here is a freshness, deep down things,
dearest, oh morning, eastward springs,
a spirit bent over the world broods
with her warm brest and with ah! bright wings.1

1 Gerald Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur," Gerald Manley Hopkins, Penguin, 1953, p.27.

Ron Price 20 July 2001