This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
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On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
@clo:
Contributions for the week of March 2, 2026
Contributions for the week of March 9, 2026
Contributions for the week of March 16, 2026
Contributions for the week of March 23, 2026
Contributions for the week of March 30, 2026
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Normally I'd put this in the Wednesday wellness thread but I'm in a bit of a crisis here so I figured I'd crowdsource some wisdom from the Motte. My wife is bipolar and also a bit of an alcoholic. For most of the ten years we've been together, her drinking has been in the gray zone of "probably drinks a little more than she should." When she drinks past a certain point, she tends to get real mean. Anyway, over the past several weeks it seems like both her mood and her drinking have gotten worse. On Sunday evening she had a full-on drunken meltdown, screaming at me, expressing suicidal ideation, etc. She slept all day monday, then woke me up at 3AM Tuesday morning, drunk again, and again expressing what seemed to me like suicidal ideation. I had to go to work so after she finally went to sleep around 830 AM, I wrote her a long note confronting the issue. I get home and she basically refuses to talk to me. I should mention that most of the conversations are happening over text because we have a small child and also an in-home nurse who helps with childcare. I text that if she doesn't want to talk about it, I'm going to get a hotel once we get our child down so I can clear my head. Anyway, I've finished putting the child down for the night, I come out, and her care is gone. Nurse doesn't know where she went and it doesn't look like she's getting my texts. What do I do? Call the cops? Seek a psychiatric hold? I don't really know, it feels like the situation is escalating way faster than I can deal with it and my attempts to address the problem are only making things worse.
EDIT: I got a hold of her on the phone and she was sober, rational, and promised not to do anything "irreversible" (my word). She said she'd be back in time for me to go to work. I agree that long-term changes will need to be made - its what I've been pushing for - and I think its more likely that she'll accept that if I give her a modicum of space to process than having it forced on her, however tempting that possibility. I don't have any texts to show the cops (she didn't really respond to any of my texts so it would only show a one-sided conversation) and I suspect my City PD will other priorities than trying to track down her car over a quite wide possible search area. So I am going to take a calculated risk and take her at her word. Thank you to everyone who responded. I will try to follow up in a day or two here for everyone who took the time to help.
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.
As per the request of at least two people here, im going to make an effort-post of my recent digital minimalist experiment.
Beginning
I was online too much and fairly aware of it. A lot of my time when not working was spent either on social media, news, YouTube, or gaming (mostly merge games). And really it was beginning to be a concern that I was spending enough time doing those things that the screen time on my iPad was somewhere near 4-6 hours a day. That didn’t leave much time for other things really.
Somewhere in my binging, I came across a lot of people reenacting historical eras. I think someone here put me on the one about pioneer cooking. But it was all very appealing in the sense that in all of them, the people reenacting being British in the 1940s, the medieval dancers, the renaissance dressmakers hand sewing a dress, whatever other rabbit holes you’d find in that genre of video is that there are several things missing from modern society: personal connections to other people, doing things in the real world, and organic culture. None of the kinds of things that people did as part of normal human behavior in the eras before the cell phones happened organically anymore. I don’t know any folk songs or dances, I didn’t have any real nonconsumptive hobbies, and while I have friends, hanging out was much more of a planned thing than just walking around and meeting people or having people just hang out. The one thing that the kept coming back to me was a quote from the Vintage Dollhouse vlog “We don’t do anything anymore.” It’s actually true, at least compared to eras where cooking required an oven and chicken and vegetables you chopped yourself, cleaning means you have to push the vacuum cleaner yourself, etc. Even shopping was different in 1940 as you not only didn’t have Amazon, but you didn’t have Walmart either so shopping means going to several shops, and often means accidentally bumping into someone you know there or at least the guy/girl behind a counter. It’s also true about things like exercise — in general you’d get a bit of exercise by playing or dancing with other people, or walking around town rather than lifting weights at home. And socializing was doing things with people you know in the same room. Card games, maybe listening to baseball or soccer or whatever sport, working on a hobby together as opposed to modern online gaming or social media or texting where everyone is in their home on their couch alone and only communicating through a screen or headset.
I decided that obviously this was not a healthy way to spend my time, and furthermore that it needed to change. So after reading a fair bit about digital detox plans and finding none that seemed sensible, I came up with something that was more of a personal challenge than anything else. Inspired by the 1940s Brits I’d been watching, the rules I came up with were fairly simple. For the next month, I would not use any entertainment technology that was unavailable in 1946. I did allow radio, streaming music and podcasts, but no screens (I don’t have an analog radio). I also limited my news consumption to 5 minutes of NPR News as a podcast in the morning.
Difficulties
I didn’t find it too hard to get used to the new lifestyle really. The biggest issue I had was that when I had downtime, I’d want to reach for a device to play a game or scroll or whatever else. Having something else at hand helps quite a lot actually. For me it’s often a book of puzzles or a book to read near my chair. Rainy days or winter days were less fun, though I don’t think it was much worse than being a it bored until my brain came up with a solution. But again having something analog available whenever the itch of boredom strikes and having activities or chores or something that you do when boredom strikes will solve the problem as long as you stay committed.
General Observations
First of all, it’s kind of amazing how quickly your world reorients itself away from the kind of culture war stuff that people like to yell about on social media and events happening far away. I was only vaguely aware of Gaza and Ukraine going on. I stopped worrying about trans and woke stuff. Trump is less of a mythic figure for good or ill, and more of a guy who says annoying things online and occasionally does something really dramatic. And most of it (other than the gas prices) has little effect on my life. On the other hand, I took much more of an interest in local news, my own neighborhood, people I work with, and so on. It’s a reversal of how most people seem to think about the news — most people are focused on culture wars like trans, IVF, Trump, MAGA, and international wars. And even when those issues came up, they were not outrage bait. It was just “okay, we just bombed Iran.” It was unexpected, sure, but it was just a thing that happened, it wasn’t something I felt the need to be excited or angry about (except that it sucks that gas prices have nearly doubled). I want it over, but I can also put it down. It’s part of my world, but it’s not something to get excited about.
Second, it’s weird how it’s seems to have slowed down the world to something more manageable. I don’t need to be in a big hurry, I don’t need to decide right now, and I’m not trying to absorb exobytes of unrelated data in the attempt to make sense of the world. If something happens that I want to make up my mind about, I can think about it for hours or days before I decide what I think. If I want to do something, I can do it when it suits me. And I don’t have to worry about missing something important. Going back to the first point, most of it isn’t important, and if it is, it will still be there a few days or a week later. I find the effect relaxing. I don’t feel stressed by the rush of a world that goes at the speed of a computer because I don’t have to match that pace.
Third, I find it much easier to just be in the moment. I like to go walking on nice days and I find it a bit easier to notice the environment. Squirrels fighting over their favorite trees, birds flying around, flowers and trees budding or blooming. I can watch clouds overhead and notice the shapes and the types. I stop to say hi to neighbors I see when I walk by. When I’m reading or doing a puzzle, I can just be doing a puzzle or reading a book. I can give it my full attention for an hour or two. Whatever I happen to be doing, I can just be doing that thing, without feeling distracted by thoughts about things happening elsewhere.
Current approach to technology
I still mostly stay as analog as possible. I do allow myself to watch TV with other people— for example if we all decided we want to get together to watch football, baseball, or basketball it’s fine. Other than that, and coming here on occasion, I mostly stay offline except for radio, music or podcasts (I stay away from politics podcasts).
The evaluation frame I’ve been using to decide what to allow in is pretty simple.
1). Is this technology useful? Do I even need it? Can I do this easily another way? I’m personally of the opinion that if you don’t actually need the technology, it’s best to be somewhat skeptical, especially since it appears that the economic model of most entertainment apps is keeping users on as long as possible.
2). What kinds of things would this technology keep me from doing? If it’s going to keep me inside doing nothing useful, it’s not good. It’s also not good if it takes over a task or skill that I value.
3). What does this technology do to my community? Is it bringing people into real relationships, is it sowing division? Is it radicalizing people, or creating mental health problems for people? If it’s destroying your community, to me it seems like after you know it causes those problems, to keep using the technology is in some sense not only being okay with it, but participating in those harms.
Alternate title: Acid Convinced Me I Am Exactly Who I Thought I Was
As the engaged and parasocially addicted reader I hope you are, you might remember that I’ve previously dabbled in mind-altering substances. Up until recently, however, my exposure to anything serious was strictly limited to psilocybin administered under clinical conditions.
I originally accepted the mushroom extract because I was depressed. It worked, in the sense that I spent the next four months and change feeling reliably not depressed. Psychiatry loves to invent tidy Greek and Latin wrappers for the chaotic human experience, and “euthymic” is the designated term here. It is a polite way of describing the baseline state the rest of us are desperately trying to claw our way back to. At the very least, it’s what I write down in my clinical notes unless you, the patient, are giving me serious cause for concern.
But the psilocybin eventually wore off, and the medical establishment won't just put you back in a clinical trial because you ask nicely. I was struggling badly again, so I turned to LSD.
My first foray was a trial run. The dealer advertised a 300 µg tab, which I conservatively cut in half. Going by subjective effect, along with the generally optimistic nature of street mathematics, it felt closer to 75-125 µg. There were no real visuals. The walls maintained their structural integrity, abstaining from the perceptible motion usually reserved for earthquakes or skyscrapers. I felt wired, more thoughtful, but mostly just myself.
Also, I was nauseous as all hell. This is to be expected from a chemical structurally adjacent to those that mushrooms evolved to keep annoying animals at bay. Unfortunately, much like with capsaicin, humans have proven to be deeply paradoxical creatures, eagerly seeking out the exact substances that burn their throats and make their stomachs churn.
Subjectively, that low-ish dose felt like a middle sibling between the sheer euphoria of MDMA and the hyper-focused disengagement of psilocybin. The only real downside was some manageable next-day dysphoria. Still, I was dissatisfied with the intensity. There was no immediate relief from the grey fog. I eyed the remaining half-tab, took extensive notes, and decided I was ready to do it again. And harder.
I did, and I almost regret it.
Set and Setting
A few days prior, I had received what could only be described as objectively good news. Not perfect news, but I felt a few British stone, or one Indian boulder, lighter. I genuinely felt eager to face the near future. Unlike my clinical trial, where the goal was to banish a treatment-resistant depression that had plagued me for a decade, this time I just wanted to make the happiness stick. If that didn't work, I'd settle for lasting contentment.
I’d learned my lessons from the trial run. I kept ondansetron on hand, a rationalist’s best friend for serotonin-receptor-induced nausea. I cleared my schedule. I found a quiet room, cranked up the aircon, turned down the lights, and queued up a good sound system. I took a full "300 µg" tab, expecting a real-world 200, and swallowed the anti-nausea medication alongside it. My two dogs, creatures of gentle breeding and absolute loyalty, snuggled in without complaint.
The effects arrived on schedule. The ondansetron performed a miracle, muting the jaw-tingling and ear-stuffiness associated with extreme serotonergic stimulation. The music sounded expansive; the colors popped. Two hours in, I decided I liked the trajectory enough to swallow the remnants of the first tab.
Then my friends arrived.
They were good friends, old friends, some I hadn’t seen in years. They knew about my situation, though they mostly weren’t psychonauts themselves. The most experienced among them had once trip-sat a guy who ended up defecating in a sink, an indignity I fully intended to spare them. I just wanted temporary companions, not babysitters. We’re getting older; we have jobs, wives, and kids. I also had family a phone call away, though I was resolved to only break that glass in an absolute emergency.
We laughed and caught up. The man I call my best friend dragged me out to look at nature, or at least the best shrubbery my suburban garden had to offer. It was a hot, sunny day. The leaves were very green. I was... whelmed. Very pretty leaves, sure, but ultimately just plant organs devoted to reasonably efficient photosynthesis.
Then, one of my friends surprised us by producing a joint of unusually high-quality weed. I dimly recalled reading that THC enhances the effects of psychedelics. I took a few measured puffs. I thought I was being sensible.
I was very wrong. Oh god. Oh fuck.
Before the marijuana, I had noticed a remarkably large pimple on my best friend’s forehead, but I hadn’t commented on it, because we’re men and it’s not my place to critique his skincare routine. I remember thinking it was remarkably large, but hey, it's his face and his business. Shortly after the marijuana, I looked at another buddy and noted that he had clearly been skipping leg day. His torso was swole; his legs were stick-thin. Taken aback, he explained he hadn’t been to the gym in years. I checked on my best friend, and found that the pimple was present, but not nearly as obtrusive. I squinted, recalibrated, and finally realized that visual proportions were simply no longer a metric my brain had a good handle on.
My friends looked alien. I knew this was an illusion, in the same way I knew my two dogs, currently busy barking at and humping each other, were not actual wolves. But the visuals and the noise were provoking a rising tide of anxiety.
I politely told them I needed to lie down. They didn't mind and kept chatting. Eventually, even the sound of their voices became too intrusive, and I had to ask them to leave.
I was alone, and I knew the weed had shifted gears. The subtle color-shimmering behind my eyelids had mutated into aggressive fractals. The walls swayed. My phone, my lifeline for timestamped notes, was folding and warping in a manner explicitly not covered by the manufacturer's warranty.
I knew I was fucked. I laid back and strapped in.
The Peak
I just kept falling. My body became leaden while my mind buzzed like a hive. The music transitioned from enjoyable into a tidal wave of synesthesia-adjacent masterpieces.
And then, I stopped thinking in words.
For the relentlessly analytical creature that I am, this is an unusual experience. The time-stamped notes ceased. Time itself meant very little. I felt my sense of self begin to fray at the edges, and I felt the universe, God, the Singularity, the collective oneness of all existence, attempting to force its way into my mind. I remember thinking, in totally alien non-words, that perhaps belief in a higher power wasn't so bad after all.
This seductive impulse didn’t whisper. It didn’t knock. It kicked down the door while I was on the shitter.
A part of me recoiled. The core of my identity rebelled. It is not a metaphor when I say I saw literal tendrils, soft white shoots, forcing their way into the cracks of my mind, offering me metaphysical solace and cosmic meaning. It is even less of a metaphor when I say that the little kernel of "me" that remained manifested a pair of scissors and snipped them away as fast as they sprouted. Buddy, I saw these things. Knowing you're hallucinating is not a robust cure for insanity.
Next, I saw myself as a knot, pulled taut and threatening to unravel under the tension of competing ontologies and bad epistemics. But it held firm. Even a heroic dose of mind-altering substances failed to break my stubborn, logically oriented materialism. Before the peak, I had written in my notes that any version of me returning from this trip with claims of metaphysical insight was, in a very real sense, no longer me. Now I had peaked, and my priors remained perfectly intact.
I saw God trying to fuck my brain through my eye socket, and my first instinct was to castrate him. Okay, this one is an actual metaphor, but it's one I came up with barely after the peak.
I realized then that there is an immutable, unshakable core beneath the masks I wear. Short of serious neurological degradation, I could trust myself to persevere through whatever slings and arrows life throws at me without losing my mind.
The Descent and the Meta-Self
Eventually, time began to make sense again. I became introspective. I felt sobriety slowly reconstructing itself from the wreckage of my mind, though it was a drawn-out process.
The peak was followed by a gentle, strange glide. I remember one version of me during the comedown who despaired of ever reaching sobriety, terrified of annihilation, begging not to die, terrified that his specific qualia would vanish into compressed digital journal notes and fading, imperfect memory.
The next iteration of me was highly meta, a journalist preoccupied with the act of journalism. He finally understood (in emotive terms, and not just intellectually as I usually do) that the entity I call “myself” is a gestalt, a series of 3D snapshots embedded in a hypercube stretching from the past to the infinite future. My life is a relay race, each past self rushing to pass the baton to the next. At times, this was a brisk walk, at other times, a sprint. During the trip, the poor bastards that are myself were rolling downhill in wheelchairs. But hey, they did their job. Now I do mine. The internal continuity I feel might lack objective grounding, but it’s a load-bearing construct nonetheless.
This meta-self chuckled at how pretentious I would find him once sober. He knew he’d be gone soon, and he wished me well. He observed that a mind without the filters and structures we rely on is fundamentally non-functional. Sanity is adaptive. He faded away with a smile, handing the wheel back to the next, slightly more sober guy. For what it's worth, I don't dislike him as much as he thought. I recognize that aspect of myself, and am mostly fond of it.
At some point, I remembered Scott Alexander’s short story Samsara. It is the one about the solitary materialist in a world where everyone else has succumbed to an Enlightenment memetic plague that genuinely makes them happier at the cost of their epistemics. I identified with and felt great empathy for the protagonist, but I also looked down on him. I had just seen the face of God and spat at it. I was perfectly content remaining in the cycles of Samsara, even if the upholstery needs some work.
My live notes from this exact moment read:
“I love feeling anti-Enlightened. Like that story Scott wrote, about the only materialist left on earth, who was tricked into becoming enlightened by virtue of his rejection of enlightenment. Hah. I'm still here. Bitch.”
Make of that what you will. I stand by it.
The Empty Quarry
The rest of the trip was an exercise in logistics and emotional housekeeping. I began to think and plan ahead, and regained opinions on the music, which gradually became less sublime. Along the way, I asked myself the questions I am usually afraid to answer out loud.
I noted my anxiety about the Singularity, which I believe is imminent on empirical grounds rather than faith. I fear death, and aging: for myself and those I love. I fear not being around to experience the end of the beginning. I want us to build heaven from the bones of an apathetic universe and forge something that cares out of dying stars. I genuinely think that is more likely than getting paperclipped, though not by a margin wide enough to bring me much peace.
I examined my anxieties about my career, my finances, and the lofty standards set by my parents. That I may or may not have the time to establish myself as a man, a husband and father, a writer, a doctor, before it becomes moot. I mused on how conflicted I feel about the trajectory of my life, even if I've usually lived up to my expectations and made my parents proud. I know I am not a bad person: I don't give my spare change away to save shrimp, but I do genuinely try to help. This was helpful to remember and also sincerely believe with most of my guard down.
I thought about my father, a surgeon who works harder than a human body should allow. He is not emotionally constipated; he cares deeply about my feelings. But quiet, relentless work is his love language. With tears drenching my cheeks, I realized he would work himself to death for us if he had to, and he’d die on his feet with a smile.
I don't want him to. I want to become so established that he can look at me, feel the safety of it, and finally slow down. At the same time, I notice I’ve inherited his drive. I work harder than I need to because I am already providing for the family I don't quite have yet: the wife yet unmarried, the kids yet unborn.
To my slight but enduring disappointment, it turns out my constant sober rumination and relentless introspection actually works. I already knew all of these answers. I could have produced them on minimal prodding when sober, even more easily if drunk and disinhibited. I have already done so, repeatedly.
Not even a heroic dose of LSD could help me mine for psychological insights that didn't exist; the quarry was already bare. I understand myself. I wouldn't trust any grand unified theories about the wider universe generated on acid, but I would have appreciated a slightly deeper glimpse into my own interiority. Like any good Bayesian, I am forced to treat this absence of evidence as evidence of absence. I am, almost certainly, exactly who I thought I was.
I wouldn’t ever like to be quite that high again. It felt dangerously close to bumping up against a glass ceiling of the psyche. I do intend to alter myself, physically and mentally, in the future, but psychedelics can only get you so far.
It is too early to tell if the contentment will stick, but the day after, I feel euthymic. It is quieter in my head. For someone with ADHD, this is a profound relief. As a delightful bonus, my usually omnipresent mild tinnitus seems to have vanished. If that proves permanent, the ordeal was worth it on those grounds alone.
I consider myself a better materialist for the experience. But note that I do not view the experience as self-flagellation, I didn't seek out... whatever the hell that was. The flagella of cosmic unity tried to force their way in, and I stayed the course. Can't let the team down; the ancestors and descendants are counting on me. If God or the administrators of the Ancestor Simulation want to talk to me that badly, they can send an email.
A Brief Note on Harm Reduction:
As clinical experiments go, my methodology was garbage. The clinician and the subject were the same person, and both of them were tripping balls in a manner they hadn’t realized was physically possible. I was already happier than I had been in a... very long time when I tried this. Nothing I have said or will say constitutes medical advice.
Do not take heroic doses of LSD unless you have a damn good reason. If you must, do not add cannabis unless you have meticulously researched the interactions. And if you do add cannabis, do not come crying to me when you find yourself castrating God with imaginary scissors to prevent Him from mind-fucking you. Or if you do get mind-fucked, for the matter, I will be sympathetic but less than useful. I've warned you. And I warn you again:
Some doors, once opened, cannot be closed until the half-life clears your system. Sometimes they stay ajar forever, no matter how hard you shove. From a mental health perspective, the evidence for psilocybin and ketamine is far more robust, and the latter is actually medically available in many jurisdictions.
I don't want to be this high ever again. But I am very glad to be back.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
WARNING: Long, rambly post that's a mix of personal experiences, historical summary and hot-take opinionating.
My first glimpses of China were surreal and desolate. The landscape looked positively Siberic in an almost hallucinatory way; dry, dusty fields smothered with snow and ice stretched to the horizon, only interrupted by groups of austere commieblock-filled xiaoqu that seemed almost copypasted, rising out of the surrounding countryside like strange alien monoliths. I was travelling from the international airport to downtown Beijing, and all the way to Dongzhimen the winter sun streamed in through the windows of the carriage, lighting up the interior with a wan glow. After some time spent navigating the Dongzhimen station trying to transfer to a new line (involving an encounter with a genuinely revolting public toilet), I was well and truly exhausted. I made it to the front desk of my hotel as soon as the sun started to set, stumbled my way through a conversation with a receptionist who knew just enough English for me to converse with, got my connection working for just enough time to check in, and dragged myself and all my luggage into the hotel room. I slotted my keycard into the holder just by the door, and every light began to turn on. Inside, it was exceptionally well-insulated to the point it actually felt hot, which was rather surprising considering how chilly it had been outside of the hotel.
Relieved, I spent some time showering and unpacking, then made my way down to the front desk again just to ask if the bottled water in the room was free. Once I got back to my room, the phone by the bed started to ring, and upon picking it up an automated message began to come through informing me that a delivery had been made to me. I opened the door, and found myself staring blankly at a small, kind of cute robot standing in front of the threshold to my room. There was a display on its head with a button that instructed me to "press to open", and upon touching it a panel on the robot slid open to reveal a large hollow space containing two water bottles.
One thing was for sure: I was not in Kansas anymore.
China is one of these rare destinations that's really hard to get any kind of remotely objective take on; it's such a polarising country that anything you read really needs to be taken with a 2 kg block of salt. There is no way to get a somewhat neutral, slice-of-life take on China; not even on YouTube where you might expect to see the equivalent of channels like Abroad In Japan, the country is just so polarising that everything either turns into a SerpentZA-like channel wherein everything in China is awful and nothing is ever allowed to be good, or outright China proselytising. Both sides are extremely committed to their worldviews, and both sides shout extremely loudly - though I will say the China detractors are considerably more loud in the West, which makes sense due to geopolitical anxieties surrounding its meteoric rise; the Place, China meme accurately summarises a whole lot of the discourse around the country. It's a place that has been sensationalised to hell and back, but oddly enough few international tourists actually seem to want to see what it's like for themselves.
I will say that it is not the easiest place to travel, though not for the reasons that other countries are challenging for travellers. Usually travel is difficult due to safety or infrastructure concerns when a country is significantly undeveloped, China is quite the opposite - infrastructure is mostly convenient and reliable and the country is very safe. Rather, the issue here is that the country is its own world that really doesn't seem to care about catering to any laowai not already entrenched within its ecosystem or way of doing things. While it's offered visa-free travel to many countries, reducing barriers for travel, at a minimum you will need to set up Alipay, WeChat and Gaode Maps on your phone and make sure you know how to use them beforehand (including the DiDi mini app on Alipay), get an esim that allows you to circumvent the Great Firewall, and make sure you have a good translate app and a cursory knowledge of phrases like "Hello, I don't speak Chinese", something that I'm sure you'll be using very often because it's rare to find even basic English comprehension in China. Note that Alipay and WeChat require a lot of account verification, including scanning your passport and your face, and it can only be properly set up and used when you are in China, so you will only know that it works once you touch down. And a lot of these apps are irritating bloatware that harvest your data. Your data plan can still be sluggish as hell at points, something that I think may be due to security measures creating extreme latency though I'm not fully sure what causes it (locals don't seem to have this problem, at least). Oh, and I've heard it's difficult to drive in China due to aggressive driving behaviours being common; the repeated refrain from travellers is that you should just use public transport and DiDi if you want to get where you want. And smoking is sometimes a noticeable issue. But the country is so old and so spectacular that the juice is well worth the squeeze. It may be my favourite place in Asia at this point, and I have plans to go again this December.
It goes without saying that China is just different, to the point that this has been the hardest trip report for me to write so far. And barely anyone has a correct view of what it is actually like. It is like looking at a barely-recognisable, funhouse-mirror, heavily sinified alternate history of the world where everything just turned out differently. There are a million and one notable aspects of travelling in China I could have mentioned when covering this country, ranging from everything from the very good to the very frustrating, and there are aspects which I genuinely barely even know how to make up my mind up on. It's a very ancient country with its own set of deeply ingrained norms that hugely conflicts with the party line (though there's a lot to say about how the state in practice is a lot less ideological or centralised than people tend to portray it as), it's ostensibly communist but on the ground seems hypercapitalist in a way that pretty much no Western country is, and it's recently experienced a rise that's nothing short of meteoric, having speedrun its way from being poorer than Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s to a world power today. The contradictions are blistering to the point it feels like being flashbanged, there are so many aspects of China that are just really difficult to properly synthesise.
I woke up early the next morning and headed down into the subway, tapped my international bank card at the turnstiles, sent my sling bag through the mandatory security scanner, and made my way to the platform. Beijing’s subway network is vast and impressively comprehensive, but I found navigating it to be very disorienting. The station was downright maze-like, with many long corridors and layered passageways that blurred together, and there was also a lot of security and surveillance; bag checks were routine, and cameras could be seen everywhere. But the system was efficient and the commuters moved very quickly, which I appreciated. After living in Sydney, where slow walkers have sometimes caused me to miss trains (seriously, people here walk at the speed of Roombas), I quite enjoyed the efficiency of movement in China. Admittedly this was a double-edged sword, since at times during the trip I felt like I couldn't relax because people there were always hustling.
Surprisingly enough, though, being in a crowd was never all too hard to handle, since people in China are actually more orderly than people tend to think; they push and shove far less than is usually imagined in the foreign public consciousness. In spite of the perception of Mainland Chinese as being notoriously selfish and opportunistic and incapable of maintaining order in situations that call for it, I didn't find it to be bad at all. Vietnam was an order of magnitude worse in this regard, the amount of people who just carelessly shoved straight through lines was almost unbelievable. I found Chinese people to be much more rule-abiding and pro-social; perhaps that wasn't the case a decade ago or so, but at this point China's not that much worse than everywhere else in this regard, it's just far more dense population-wise. Granted, other things such as people clearing their throat and spitting on the sidewalk still exists, though in my opinion it's really not that obstructive to you personally if you're not super picky about everyone around you conforming to strict norms of propriety. It is a different country and culture after all.
Once I disembarked, I made my way toward the Forbidden City, the largest preserved palace complex in existence (depending on how you define this, the Summer Palace and its gardens may be larger, though its grounds are mostly water). It's a veritable maze of halls that sits directly in the heart of Beijing, oriented on a north-south axis aligned with such precision that it deviates only one degree from geographic north. This axis extends far beyond the confines of the palace itself, continuing through a massive urban corridor approximately 7,500 meters in length which features several of the capital’s most significant monuments. These include the Drum and Bell Towers to the north and, to the south, the Temple of Heaven, the Temple of Agriculture, and the Zhengyangmen Gate Tower. It really only became the seat of power relatively recently (well, recent for Chinese standards, which basically means nothing) when the Yongle Emperor designated Beijing as a secondary capital in 1403, diminishing the previous capital of Nanjing in importance. Once it eventually became the principal capital, the Forbidden City would be the seat of political power for the rest of traditional Chinese history.
On my way to the palace, I noticed that every street seemed to go on forever, stretching into the distance in a manner that I found to be almost dizzying. There is something incredibly agoraphobia-inducing about how all of Beijing is designed, but it leans into it so much that it actually loops back around into making the city kind of distinctive in its own way. This isn't a consequence of modern Chinese city-planning either; when determining the layout of the new city, Ming Dynasty planners based it on ancient manuals going all the way back to the Zhou, specifically the Kaogong Ji (regulations of construction). The capital was always meant to be an expression of imperial power and cosmic order, and its stipulations included that the capital be "a square of nine li" criss-crossed by "nine lanes going north-south and east-west, each of the former being nine chariot tracks wide" that bisected the urban fabric into regular squares. Visitors to the city in the early 20th century described it as a maze of "walls, walls and more walls", something that can be easily seen in many of the old streets extant today. Beijing was designed to be monumental, not cosy, and much of the modern city actually is still somewhat built on the bones of the old one, with the nine thoroughfares of the old capital now expanded into staggering multi-lane highways that extend far beyond the borders of what used to be Ming Dynasty Beijing. Pretty much every artery in the urban core, whether it be modern or traditional, is laid out in the same symmetrical, rhythmic manner that has characterised the city for centuries. In other words, Beijing is very intimidating, and not because the government is extremely overbearing or people act particularly antisocially, rather it's because most of the city's vernacular constructions from every era of its history are inherently so monumental in size, so stately and so anonymised that you get this strange feeling of being dwarfed by its endless grid of streets.
I eventually found myself in a series of lanes lined with the archetypical grey-brick hutongs that Beijing is known for. Some lanes featured many vendors selling tanghulu, rice cakes, and other snacks; others were much quieter and very local, with older Beijingers wandering about, scooters buzzing past, and laundry strung up overhead. Before long I reached Donghuamen Gate (the eastern entrance that conveniently avoids the security at Tiananmen Square), and from there I wandered along the edge of the palace toward the southern entrance for ticket checks. As I walked, towering red abutments and pavilions loomed above me, mirrored in the partially frozen waters of the moat. Bare willow branches hung over the ice, and the path featured everyone from elderly locals to hanfu-clad Douyin girls stopping every few steps for photos against the crimson backdrop. When I finally reached the Meridian Gate, I joined a surprisingly short queue, handed over my passport, scanned my sling bag, and walked through the towering entrance.
The original Forbidden City built by the Ming Dynasty was an extremely luxurious palace, which used precious and rare Phoebe zhennan wood from the jungles of southwestern China to construct its halls (this was an extremely valuable timber in ancient China, and was even more so when fossilised; that was known as "black wood" and to this day it fetches prices of up to thousands upon thousands of dollars per cubic metre). Grand terraces and stone carvings were built by means of massive blocks of quarried stone, which were able to be transported only through covering the ground with a layer of ice in deep winter and then pulling the blocks along. Halls were paved with expertly crafted bricks, made with clay from multiple provinces; each batch took months to make. The interior pavings, seen today, are these very six-century old originals. But a good number of the wooden structures within the Forbidden City date back to the Qing, as the palace complex did not escape the end of the Ming Dynasty unscathed. After Li Zicheng and his rebel troops marched on Beijing in an attempt to overthrow the Ming Dynasty, after the Chongzhen Emperor hung himself in despair and ruin in the gardens of the palace, after the Manchus conquered China with the help of a Ming general who let them into the country, the three main halls in the central axis of the palace, among others, had burned to the ground. The Qing reconstructed the halls of the palace carefully with pinewood, and maintained the general layout rather faithfully (though they did make every plaque within the palace bilingual, featuring Chinese and Manchu scripts alike). Some parts of the palace, however, are still extant from the Ming Dynasty, such as the Wanchun Pavilion in the imperial garden.
I stepped into an immense courtyard bisected by a sinuous waterway (named the "Inner Gold Creek", or Nejinshui) with five stone bridges plunging over it. Two stone lions stood watch over the entire courtyard. At the northern edge rose another grand entrance beyond which lay an even larger square, which rewarded me with a striking view of the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Rebuilt most recently in 1695, it's a huge wooden structure built on a stone platform, used for everything from enthronment and wedding ceremonies to banquets for solstices. I couldn’t enter the vast interior, though; the front of the palace was crowded and I was only able to get distant glimpses of the imposing throne inside. As I tilted my head upward, I noticed rows of small glazed ceramic figures marching along the roof’s ridgelines which were believed to ward off misfortune in ancient China. Customarily, a man riding a phoenix would stand at the head of the procession while the tail terminated with a dragon. Between these two figures, there would be an odd number of mythological creatures, the total number of which signified the rank or importance of the building. Each ridge on the Hall of Supreme Harmony featured ten of them in total.
The Forbidden City is an absolute labyrinth of a palace, and I can confidently say that I got lost multiple times navigating the complex of nested courtyards that make up the Inner Court; it felt like being stranded in a maze of red walls and intricate yellow-roofed buildings. Out of everything I think my favourite part of the palace was the small Imperial Garden just north of the three main halls of the Outer Court, which is a finely-wrought park full of rock gardens, pavilions and other architectural elements that create a feeling of intimacy otherwise not found in other parts of the palace. The Wanchun Pavilion in the garden is probably the finest structure in the whole palace, featuring a spectacular domed caisson created by the successive layering of wooden brackets, the very top of which is adorned with a finely carved bas-relief of a dragon. Another structure that really caught my eye was the intricately glazed Nine-Dragon Screen in the northeastern part of the palace, a piece of auspicious iconography that appears only in palaces (there are only three of them extant today).
I left the Forbidden City through the northern gate and walked further to Nanluoguxiang, one of these trendy hutong streets that have been transformed into shopping districts; as I walked there I passed through a whole lot more of these authentic local hutongs. Honestly I was constantly surprised by just how extensive these hutong neighbourhoods were; at times, they seemed to stretch on endlessly, like a Backrooms-esque parallel dimension made entirely of these gridlike lanes. Before arriving, I’d seen people on travel forums wondering whether any "real" authentic hutongs were left at all, but after visiting Beijing, these questions seem borderline laughable - walk in any given direction from the Forbidden City and it almost seems as if you can't get out of the hutongs (and no, I'm not talking about the more old-style but obviously new constructions, I'm talking about local hutongs that barely seem renovated). In spite of Beijing's reputation as a modern city, a large portion of the urban sprawl is actually not like that; I'd even go as far as to say that Beijing is the most ancient-looking major city I've ever seen in East Asia. I honestly think the people bemoaning China's "lack of heritage" either haven't visited China, didn't make even a token attempt to go find any of it, or are generally unaware of how bad the situation regarding preservation can be in the rest of Asia (or are just repeating a canard they've heard without considering it that much). China is by far the most historically dense place I've visited in the entire continent, and despite the fact that my expectations were sky-high beforehand even I didn't expect so much history from the country.
I do want to temper this quite a bit, though. While I saw a lot of extant preserved old architecture, I don't want to overly glorify or romanticise these neighbourhoods, since many of them are obviously barely gentrified or modernised at all. China modernised very fast and very unevenly, and despite their status as a symbol of old Beijing, people in the hutongs often seem to live without a lot of infrastructure (such as proper plumbing systems). I can understand why the Chinese government has not precluded renovation of the hutongs, even after its announcement of a protection order on these neighbourhoods. They're not always very glamorous places to be, and personally I agree with an approach that introduces more modern amenities into these hutongs while still preserving its fundamental character; it would be nice to see improvements in the quality of life for the people living there.
The next day I woke up to a gloomy winter morning, with thick mist and fog hanging over all the streets of downtown Beijing. Everything looked almost colourless, like some kind of vintage grey filter had been placed over the entire city, and it was freezing. Northern China is climactically awful and is largely a cold, grey, arid wasteland in winter, to the point that Beijing actually boasts colder temperatures than Helsinki during this time of the year in spite of its lower latitude (due to the directional nature of the Coriolis effect, east coasts are generally far colder than west coasts; as a particularly stark example of this, Vladivostok, Russia is on the same latitude as Florence, Italy). The fact that any civilisation was able to flourish here in spite of the horrific climate and the Yellow River's constant catastrophic flooding is actually astonishing to me.
I pulled myself out of bed, descended into the subway again, trudged past a bunch of commieblocks which gave way to more of these local hutongs (seriously they are everywhere) and made my way to the first stop of the day: Zhihua Temple. It's an obscure but well-preserved Ming Dynasty wooden temple built in 1443, hidden within the backstreets of Beijing, painted in such a vivid crimson and adorned with such deeply black roof tiles that to my eyes it seemed to practically pop in the sea of fog and mist. Making my way towards the shanmen gate of the temple, I noticed a marble plaque above it with Chinese characters that stated "Gifted by the Imperial Court to Zhihua Temple". Entering the grounds revealed a courtyard of modest size, flanked by temple halls all around. A small number of robed men exited a room, and headed into the main hall to play traditional ritual music from the Ming Dynasty, which had been passed down for 27 generations in this very temple. They sat down in front of a modest altar featuring three wooden-lacquered Buddha statues on lotus pedestals, and in the cold dark Beijing winter I watched them play a very strange and sweet music.
After the music was over, I proceeded to see what the other halls had in store. To the west of the main hall, there was another wooden building housing an incredible wooden zhuanlunzang (sutra case) covered in intricate carvings of bodhisattvas, heavenly kings and warriors and topped with a small caisson that a tiny Vairocana Buddha sat in. A bit awestruck, I walked around the entire thing, just taking in the immense level of detail. Deeper to the back of the complex, there was a large two story pavilion featuring three huge statues, surrounded by walls covered in niches featuring what is said to be 9,999 tiny renderings of the Buddha. I later learned that this hall was, quite aptly, named the "Thousand Buddha Hall". I would have spent more time at this temple but the biting cold was beginning to get to me, so I ducked into a small teashop in the hutong and had some rather medicinal-tasting flower tea alongside a small rice cake as I decided on where to venture next.
I scrolled some possible destinations on my phone in the cosy warmth of the teahouse, and resolved to visit the Yonghe Temple towards the north of the city. Yet again, I was seemingly trapped in a parallel dimension full of hutongs the entire way, and had to use some extremely suspect communal toilets if I wanted to relieve myself. Note this is coming from someone who's probably better equipped to use Chinese toilets than most Westerners - they're mostly squat, and having grown up in Southeast Asia I'm used to squat toilets and generally prefer them (if you can't squat properly, that is your skill issue, it is objectively superior ergonomically and cleaner). But the toilets in these very old parts of Beijing are legitimately terrible and feature toilets with dividers instead of a dedicated stall, meaning everyone can see you defecate - and they are extremely dirty, I often found piss covering the floor and at least one squat toilet covered in diarrhoea. It is incredible to me how a country that's so obviously advanced in multiple important ways can be so undeveloped in others. Though I will grant that the hutongs are uniquely bad in this regard, having been barely modernised ever since the Qing; other parts of China are far better with this (though unless you find yourself in a shopping mall, they will still often lack essentials like soap and toilet paper; you must bring your own when going to China, this is non-negotiable).
Eventually I made it to a huge food street just ahead of the Yonghe Temple, featuring a large variety of snacks and congregations of people lining up in front of every shop. It's not uncommon at all in Asia to find bustling food-filled squares near popular temples, providing nourishment and a social space for templegoers. For now, I ignored the street and made my way to the temple, intending to grab some food on my way out. I approached the visitor counter, grabbed a ticket, and walked into the compound through some intricate yellow-and-blue entrance archways flanked by stele pavilions and stone lions on each side. The pathway opened up into a courtyard featuring sweeping views of a monolithic red-and-yellow hall named the Yonghegong (Hall of Harmony and Peace), which hosted a plaque displaying inscriptions in Tibetan, Chinese, Manchu and Mongolian. Masses of lay worshippers stood in prayer in front of a bronze burner, with wafts of warm, fragrant smoke rising up from the forest of incense sticks and mixing seamlessly with the mist and cloud overhead.
When Yonghe Temple was built in the 1690s, it was not initially conceived of as a temple but as a royal residence, and it would end up housing two future Qing emperors before they ascended the throne and moved into the Forbidden City. The residence was initially built for Prince Yong, who would eventually become the Yongzheng Emperor, and it was in its East Compound that his fourth son (the future Qianlong Emperor) would be born. After Yongzheng died there was a proposal for it to be converted into a residence for other royals, but Qianlong instead issued an edict legislating it be turned into a Tibetan lamasery, as he was a particularly large supporter of the religion. Although the Qing court generally patronised and funded Tibetan Buddhism pretty heavily as a method of gaining support from outlying territories such as Tibet and Mongolia (and in general bending Tibetan Buddhism to serve the empire's needs), Qianlong took this to another level; he practiced Yellow Hat Buddhism in his private life, and even had a guru who believed he was the reincarnation of Kublai Khan. After its consecration in 1745, Yonghe Temple rose to become the foremost Buddhist temple in China, hosting monks from across Tibet and Mongolia. Its turquoise roof tiles were replaced with lavish yellow ones to signify imperial status.
Inside the hall, a gleaming triad of bronze statues depicting the Buddhas of the Three Ages stood front and centre, each one backed by stunning nimbuses, auspicious iconography and mythical creatures. Here, even more worshippers could be found, prostrating themselves and praying in front of the deities. And the rest of the hall was just as sumptuous - the scene here can only be described as an explosion of colour, with the entire interior covered in floor-to-ceiling paintings and calligraphy inscribed onto every pillar. On the sides of the building, facing the central Buddhist triad, stood two rows of painted Qing arhats, all harbouring different expressions and poses. Next up along the main axis of the temple lay the Yongyoudian (Hall of Everlasting Protection), another extremely picturesque hall housing yet another Buddha triad; this one was perhaps even more intricately rendered than the last. After exploring some of the auxiliary buildings located to the left and right of the main halls, which were themselves filled to the brim with an insane concentration of Buddhist treasures and crowded with worshippers, I navigated to the next hall, named the Falundian (Hall of the Wheel of the Law), and immediately felt as if I was intruding on something sacred. Inside stood a monumental statue of the master Tsongkhapa surrounded by traditional Chukor banners, with a mass of red-robed Buddhist monks sitting cross-legged around his idol and chanting in an almost trance-like reverie. Masses of lay worshippers stood or sat to the side, their heads bowed penitently. It was quite a powerful atmosphere, and I lingered here for a while listening to the ceremony.
I had some reservations about this temple given its commonality on Beijing itineraries; I feared that it wouldn't be authentic, that it would just be a tourist trap, that perhaps it wouldn't even be old, but it was the polar opposite. This, and many other experiences like it, challenged a pretty big misconception about China: that the country lacks traditional culture or religion due to The Cultural Revolution or some other event in recent Chinese history. But there's a lot of extant tradition in Mainland China, much of which is based on a longstanding cultural meta that's imperfectly comprehensible to a Western visitor, though it's frustrating that a lot of outsiders barely even seem to acknowledge it exists. It’s not uncommon for people to suggest that traditional culture and history has been all but destroyed on the mainland and maintained only on the fringes of the diaspora in places like Taiwan or Southeast Asia, I've even heard people say that the Japanese preserved Chinese culture better than China (but, having read extensively about the aggressively iconoclastic nature of Meiji Japan, I’m not even certain Japanese culture itself can be said to be all that undisturbed).
To elaborate, I’m a Malaysian Chinese who spent 16 years of my life embedded in that community, and yet in the span of two weeks in China, I saw a large amount of religious activity and traditional rituals, similar to that of Chinese communities in Southeast Asia - in spite of what Straits Chinese like to say about themselves. To spoil parts of the remainder of this trip report, it wasn't just this temple where I encountered it, either. In Pingyao’s walled city, I walked the main thoroughfare while a massive crowd of men carried a dragon float down the street to a din of clanging drums. I stayed above a jade shop in Datong, and every morning woke up to the old jade craftsman quietly working on a new piece with a pot of fresh tea bubbling beside him. At the Ming Dynasty-era Great Mosque of Xi’an, I watched as hordes of Muslims assembled in front of the hall (off limits to me, since I’m not Muslim) and sat quietly in worship. If tradition is anywhere close to dead in China, then clearly my lying eyes deceive me.
I also don’t think that the level of religiousness of the Chinese population is properly captured in surveys. People in East Asia are generally not "religious" in any kind of organised way, sure, and will often describe themselves as atheist or nonaffiliated, but will often still engage in superstitious cultural rituals and rites that are ultimately rooted in a religious view of the world without fully adhering to or caring much about strict doctrine. In general, East Asian religion is just different, and China is no exception. There are plenty of religious and at least superstitious people who follow folk practices to some degree, but for the most part they don’t spray it around very conspicuously in public, and they don’t particularly care about specifically identifying as Part Of A Group. It’s just something they do, and is individual to them in a more understated and personal way. That’s true among virtually all Chinese communities, in my opinion, but on the mainland the Han constitute the vast demographic majority, and without any other point of comparison all this just gets perceived as the baseline societal meta; you typically don't recognise the water in which you swim. Hell, I’m in accounting and still work with a lot of people hailing from the mainland now, and I recall one of them couldn’t cook in the new house she bought until the old one had finished being sold and enough time had elapsed, or something similarly insanely ritualistic. In general, a very common theme throughout this trip report is me constantly finding the culture to be rather well-preserved, even more so considering the tumultuous and often catastrophic shifts that Mainland China experienced during the 20th century.
Eventually I left the monks behind, hearing the chanting echo behind me, and progressed to the final hall in the complex: the Wanfuge (Pavilion of Ten Thousand Happinesses). It was a towering structure, featuring a three-story wooden pavilion flanked by two side buildings and connected by overhead walkways - a somewhat unusual element to see in Chinese architecture. Fewer worshippers congregated here than in the front halls, and the relative quiet lent the space a more contemplative atmosphere. I paused briefly to take it in before stepping inside, and a titanic mass emerged out of the darkness of the hall. A colossal statue of the Maitreya Buddha, nearly twenty metres tall, dominated the centre of the pavilion; walkways on each level circled the immense figure, allowing it to be viewed from every height. Carved from a single piece of sandalwood, this was a gift from the Dalai Lama to the Qianlong Emperor, and it was so unwieldy that it took three years to transport to Beijing. It's in the Guinness Book of Records, it's an absolutely monumental piece of art, and if you ever come to Beijing this is one of the best things you can see. It's fucking awesome. In general, I highly recommend the Yonghe Temple, it would be my favourite temple in Asia if not for another unbelievable temple near Pingyao, later on in the trip.
I grabbed a snack after exiting the temple (this sinfully rich meat-filled flaky pastry, I think it was called shaobing) and made my way to the final stop of the day: the iconic Temple of Heaven. It's really only a component part of a larger-scale religious complex in Beijing, alongside the Temple of the Sun, Temple of Earth, and Temple of Moon, but the Temple of Heaven is by far the best-known of these ceremonial complexes. It sits in a massive tree-filled park bisected by a series of famous halls, the most recognisable of which is the Qiniandian (Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests), a massive triple-gabled circular hall on a square terrace reflecting the East Asian cosmological concept of a square Earth and round Heaven. This was an extremely important ceremonial site in ancient China, being the place where the Emperor made ceremonial sacrifices to Heaven for, well, good harvests. Twice a year, the Emperor and his retinue would set up camp within the complex and perform a very specific ritual which no member of the public could observe. The ceremony had to be performed perfectly, or it would signify a bad omen for the coming year.
The weather was still extremely foggy when I got there, which isn't particularly ideal for the Temple of Heaven, but I grabbed a ticket anyway and proceeded into the park down a long tree-lined path. Slowly the Hall of Prayer of Good Harvests came into view, and I climbed up the massive stone platform onto the main bulk of the structure alongside many other visitors. It seems I got there all too late, as it was extremely crowded and there were way too many hanfu-clad girls posing in front of the temple in order to really enjoy it. But it was a very beautiful building; photos don't properly convey this, but the way the pavilion extrudes out from that huge circular stone pedestal induces a sense of vertigo akin to staring up into the night sky and almost makes it seem as if it's touching the heavens. It's an example of absolutely incredible Qing Dynasty design and architecture; I just wish I had better weather and less crowds for this one, and if I had to do this again I'd visit much earlier in the morning before the masses of Chinese tourists start pouring in. As it was, though, I personally preferred the parts of the park outside of the main complex of halls, where one could still see the recognisable peak of the hall protruding from far above the surrounding landscape. Here things were much more local and less touristy, with families bringing their children to play and performing activities in the park, and there were still some other historical buildings of note within the less-visited parts of the complex, which now mostly hosted museums and exhibitions.
The sun was beginning to set now, so I unfortunately had to rush through the remainder of the complex, and after I was satisfied with sightseeing I took the train to Qianmen station for dinner. At this point I was ravenous so I made my way to street level and was immediately met with the sight of the Zhengyangmen gate tower all spectacularly lit up at night, one of the quintessential icons of Old Beijing. After quickly snapping some pictures of the tower, I walked along the food street and located a relatively inconspicuous-looking eatery named Duyichu. This is one of the most acclaimed of Beijing's old restaurants, having originated in the 3rd year of Emperor Qianlong (for anyone that uses normal people dates, that's 1738); for context, at this time the US was still an imperial colony of the British, and Napoleon didn't even exist yet. But that year, this humble eatery popped up in front of the Imperial Quarter of Old Beijing and started specialising in the delicate steamed dumplings that we all now recognise as shaomai. This would spread south and become common throughout the Chinese diaspora, such that you can find it in Cantonese dim sum joints in Hong Kong and in many Chinese places in the Western world. It was here, at this very spot in Beijing, where the dish was first popularised and made into a staple of Chinese cuisine.
Surprisingly, there were no lines in front of the door considering the venerable nature of the establishment. I was able to get a table immediately, where I promptly ordered some assorted shaomai and Qianlong baicai (fresh cabbages with a thick sesame dressing, named after the titular emperor). The food came in no time at all, and I quickly discovered that Beijing's flavour profiles have a tendency to confound my tastebuds; the cabbage was tasty but a bit too acidic and heavy, though I enjoyed it nonetheless. In general, Beijingers seem to enjoy extremely heavy and simple flavours without much of the depth that I usually expect from Chinese food - food in China isn't at all one thing and the Chinese food most Westerners are accustomed to eating really primarily comes from one specific city in Canton (Taishan). The shaomai was the clear highlight to me; it was very succulent, though I can't say it was anything you couldn't get elsewhere in Asia. It's kind of been a victim of its own success I think, everybody seems to have copied the example it set, and now it's just one of the many shops that specialise in the popular dish. I polished off the meal in short order, grabbed some tea and returned to my hotel.
The next day, I found myself waiting for a bus in an aggressively nondescript Beijing street, one so crowded with towering identikit commieblocks they almost seemed to block out the dim sunlight. I was out so early that dawn hadn't broken yet, and the sky was still blanketed with fog, the poor weather from yesterday still not having abated. It was extremely humid and cold, and so I had just gotten jianbing (Chinese savoury crepes) alongside some doujiang (soy milk) from a nearby local stall, which were both comfortingly warm and tasty in the blistering Beijing winter. The doujiang in particular was incredible, and while I don't usually like soy milk, this one tasted so smooth that I wanted whatever crack cocaine they were putting in there. I sipped the drink slowly, huddling into my puffer jacket while the sun rose and the streetlights slowly flickered off. It was peaceful.
Standing there in the early morning silence, I couldn't help but think back to my limited experiences in North America; if you transplanted this place into the downtown core of many major North American cities, it would probably already be hosting a colourful, cosmopolitan, and vibrant cast of drug addicts and homeless people (this problem basically doesn’t exist in Asia, and was a major point of culture shock for me when visiting North America; you often don’t feel safe). In spite of the endless sneering about Third Worldism you can find on this forum, the biggest takeaway I’ve had in my travels throughout Asia is that very large swaths of it are starting to feel very not third world; granted, modernisation throughout the region (and even within Beijing) is uneven, infrastructure can be spotty, but many aspects of it are starting to feel more first world than even the first world. Now I'm not saying that Chinese average living standards are on par with the US yet, but its major urban areas and eastern coastal provinces are looking and feeling far more like Czechia than they are Cambodia. It’s the interior that drags this down hugely, and the state is quickly working to urbanise them all. They’re also pumping out STEM graduates en masse. From a personal standpoint, experiencing this change firsthand is quite the sight. I grew up in Asia and now large swaths of it are just unrecognisable to me; seeing the sheer pace of change in real time is just breathtaking and it’s a topic that deserves a post of its own. It’s something I’m grateful to have experienced myself, partially because living through it is incredibly existential, but also because you get the opportunity to see unique elements of local life that will soon be transformed forever as the continent charges headlong into gleaming industrial modernity, for better or for worse.
I got onto the bus alongside a number of other tourists, and it promptly pulled out of the lot, barreling down the misty roads into the suburbs of Beijing. The sun continued to inch higher and higher in the sky as we passed further into the countryside, casting a wan, diffuse glow that illuminated a barren landscape smothered in snow and fog. Before long, our bus was winding up into the mountains, where the mist began to thin out, and eventually sunshine could be seen streaming through the gradually-parting clouds. The sky slowly but surely turned blue, and after tolerating the intensely grey and foggy weather of Beijing for a good day and a half, it was refreshing to see colour again. Our bus stopped at a large tourist centre for the Mutianyu Great Wall featuring a metric fuckton of cafes and souvenir shops and weird ass VR experiences, where we went on to buy tickets for a cable car then went our own separate ways.
The legacy of the Great Wall of China stretches all the way back to the Spring and Autumn period, but this history was highly discontinuous and fractured, with there not even being a recognisable "wall" during many dynasties. Most of the extant masonry that you can see today dates from the Ming Dynasty (15th/16th centuries); granted they were built roughly along the path that the earlier Qin/Han Dynasty earthen fortifications followed, but the Ming wall was essentially a new structure since the previous dynasties' walls had almost entirely eroded and fallen into disuse. This means that there was essentially no real Great Wall during the time of the Mongols, and in fact at the time building a wall was actually considered an admission of diplomatic failure to be avoided whenever possible. Even the Ming Dynasty's wall building program was not a systematic building of fortifications to keep the invaders out wholesale, rather it was an accumulative series of defences which were constructed on an ad hoc basis in response to evolving needs, and the disparate sections of the wall were never linked up.
This was a feature, too, not a bug. For context, the main problem the Chinese encountered when defending their northern border was that attacks could come from any direction, and the enemy could also retreat in any direction. The point of building a wall was not to prevent enemies from entering China per se; rather it made sure that attacks could be confined to regular, predictable areas that could be militarised, and forced the enemy to retreat using the same avenue through which they entered. This ended up being a major issue that faced many northern invaders, such as with Hong Taiji's raids into Hebei. In addition, the wall acted as a communicative and transport structure, with any observed raids triggering a large string of warning beacons that would be funnelled all the way back to Beijing. The main point I want to stress here is that the wall itself was not meant to be the primary obstacle for an enemy, but rather as only one component of a layered defence strategy ultimately centred around the army that lay beyond it. This concept of a Great Wall is a Western concept not introduced until later in Chinese history once the walls no longer had any purpose - at the time, the Ming would instead have referred to its defence system as the Nine Garrisons (placing foremost importance on the manpower that the fortification was ultimately built to serve), rather than any kind of unified Wall.
I passed through the tourist centre and boarded a cable car that carried me further up the mountain. Below, slopes lined with leafless trees unfurled in every direction, while the sunlight grew steadily harsher as I ascended. At last, the crest of the range revealed itself, with its summit crowned by a formidable masonry wall that stretched endlessly across the horizon. I was deposited unceremoniously at a platform near the wall, where I walked past a row of vendors and stepped onto the structure. The bulk of the edifice came into view, and I watched as the ridges of innumerable mountains faded one after another into the distant haze, with the wall snaking over every single twist and turn. It was absolutely breathtaking, and at this time of year I had it largely to myself - the further I walked from the chairlift, the more the crowds thinned out, to the point where I was alone on large sections of the wall. From time to time, a vendor would call out from the margins of the wall, peering through one of the many crenellations that had now been repurposed as makeshift counters for offering snacks and drinks to weary travellers.
I eventually reached the very western end of the accessible wall and found myself faced with a particularly steep section called the "Hero Slope", which featured 600+ steps at a brutal incline of 70 degrees. Within minutes I was gasping, legs trembling as the strain built with every step, until I found myself nearly collapsing against the side. By the time I reached the highest accessible watchtower, my legs had turned to jelly and my breathing had become ragged and uncontrollable. Then I turned around, and was greeted with one of the most arresting scenes I have ever seen in my life: an endless panorama of mountains rising from a sea of mist, fine tendrils of fog curling through distant, faded peaks, and the wall itself winding and folding over the ridgelines until it vanished from sight entirely. The view was so poetic and dreamlike that it felt like stepping into a Chinese ink painting, and it really warrants every superlative people have lavished upon it, to the point I'd say that the wall alone is worth the trip to China. There's absolutely nothing else in the world like this.
After soaking in the view for a long while, I turned around and made my way back to the chairlift, this time hiking down a path that adjoined the wall. From this angle, I caught sight of a vendor on the wall from a completely different perspective; he was standing on a plank precariously buried in the side of the wall and suspended far above the surrounding mountains, just so he could take advantage of the crenellations to sell food and drink to tourists. He reached for a plastic bag of goods that sat just beyond his grasp, then calmly balanced on one leg and stretched out his arm to retrieve it, as if the dizzying drop below barely registered to him. I gaped at him for a moment, then continued down the trail and down the mountain.
Once back down at the tourist centre, I had more time to spare, so I transferred onto a chairlift that took me to the more commercialised eastern portion of the wall. My photo was taken while I was on it so they could sell a printed version of the image to me back down at the base of the mountain; tourism with Chinese characteristics is very extra. This part of the wall was more crowded and less spectacular than the western end, but was still incredibly interesting with the largest and most complex watchtower I'd seen yet. This one featured a main masonry structure flanked by two corner towers which is probably the most iconic structure on the Mutianyu Great Wall, featuring quite prominently in photographs of the area. There was also a toboggan leading down from this section of the wall which I lined up for, and I'm well aware this is clear tourist bait, but I will defend it wholeheartedly because it was extremely fun to slide down to the bottom of the mountain. I haven't tobogganed before, but the fact that the first time I've ever done so was from the fucking Great Wall is going to mean that any subsequent adventures in tobogganing are gonna struggle to top it.
By the time I returned to the urban sprawl, the thick fog had parted and the once-grey city was bathed in deep sunset hues. I passed by the Yonghe Temple again, watching its yellow rooflines glow in the warm light as I made my way to Fangzhuanchang No.69, a popular zhajiangmian restaurant just across the street from it. I seated myself at one of the tables, and ordered a bowl of their signature black bean noodles alongside a Chinese yoghurt known by the name of nai pi zi. The noodles came with massive sides of toppings ranging from edamame to bean sprouts, all of which I scraped into my bowl and ate together. It was good but I would've enjoyed a stronger flavour, for some reason a huge amount of Beijing's savoury dishes don't tickle my fancy. But the nai pi zi, on the other hand, was delicious and beats Western yoghurts any day. The texture was so creamy and far less curdy than your bog-standard yoghurt, and had a milder, sweeter flavour that I really jived with.
On my final day in Beijing, the skies at last cleared to a deep, cloudless blue. This was my last chance to visit a site I had been anticipating since arriving in China: the Yiheyuan, or Garden of Nurturing Harmony, better known in English as the Summer Palace. Much of what stands today is a late-Qing reconstruction commissioned by Empress Dowager Cixi after both it and the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) were destroyed during the Opium War. The complex unfolds across a vast landscape of some 3,000 structures, organised around a monumental lake that dominates most of the grounds. To its north, the principal sequence of palatial buildings cascades over the slopes of Longevity Hill, supported by a series of expansive artificial terraces.
While China thinks of the original destruction of the Summer Palace as a ghastly and undue act by European colonial powers (being extremely sore about that is somewhat warranted, to be fair, and the Opium Wars are generally hard to defend), the history of how that happened is a lot more nuanced and a lot more interesting than simply "Britain bad". The inciting incident that led to the destruction was an act of aggression conducted during peace talks between an Anglo-French delegation and the Qing Dynasty. The Allied powers detained the Qing prefect of Tianjin claiming they were regrouping and staging an ambush; whether this is true or not has likely been lost to history. In retaliation, the Qing detained the delegation and its envoys, and this escalated into further conflict as forces advanced on the delegation's last location in an attempt to free them. The Qing managed to procure thirty-eight captives in total, and due to execution or torture during imprisonment twenty-one died. As news of this treatment spread throughout the British forces, there was strong support for some kind of punitive action to be taken, and Lord Elgin and Baron Gros (respectively spearheading the British and French military action) were tasked with deciding what this retaliation should be. Neither party was particularly interested in causing further harm to Chinese civilians during the war, and there wasn't much support among the European populace for that either.
Something that occasionally gets overlooked in highly nationalist tellings of the event is that the primarily ethnically-Manchu ruling elite and the ethnically-Han majority did not necessarily see themselves as the same peoples with the same interests. The Qing was a colonial power itself that practiced a form of imperial and ethnic segregation; Beijing's inner city was designated as a place for Manchu bannermen, and across the empire similar segregated cities such as this existed - in fact the entire region of Manchuria was largely off-limits to most Han (this relaxed later in the Qing though). They imposed the queue hairstyle upon Han Chinese men specifically as a sign of submission to the Manchu-led state, with sizeable executions of men following upon disobedience in the early stages of Qing conquest. Burning and sacking the Summer Palace, which only the Manchu ruling elite would have had access to, was seen as less destructive than a wholesale sack of Beijing, and so this was the course of action Elgin and Gros settled on. It was both an act of retaliation and a signal to the public that their war was not with the Chinese people, but the Qing state. Keep in mind, there were certain contemporary segments of the Han populace who may not have thought of the destruction of the Summer Palace as a bad thing.
Despite all this turbulent history, the current late-Qing iteration of the Summer Palace is ridiculously lovely and ethereal. As I entered through the back gate, I was met with a stunning Tibetan-inspired palace named Sidabuzhou (Four Great Regions) that dominated the north end of Longevity Hill, yet another example of the Qing's support for Tibetan Buddhism. It was painted in a deep red and adorned with a litany of finely glazed tiles and bricks, with chimes hanging from every eave; they shimmered and tinkled quietly as the winter wind blew. Climbing the palace steps led me into an intimate rock garden threaded with pavilions, shaded with still-green trees and punctuated by small viewing towers, which I found myself exploring in a tactile, almost playful way as I wove between stones from one structure to the next. As I continued my ascent, the view constantly changed and morphed and shifted, and it struck me just how different Chinese landscaping philosophy was from the Western tradition. While European palatial gardens are often formal, geometric and open, Chinese gardens are the very opposite, being based on the philosophy of bu yi jing yi. This roughly translates to "scenes change as steps move", with the goal here being to creatively conceal aspects of the garden to create a constant sense of progression and unveiling and make a small space feel much larger than it really is. You can never get a full view of a properly designed Chinese garden from any vantage point.
I finally reached the top of the hill, and found myself gazing upon a two-story beamless hall crafted entirely from yellow-and-green glazed bricks. Each brick housed a niche with a mediating Buddha inside; in total there must have been over a thousand of these niches all over the building. The hall was framed by beautiful lush vegetation that was honestly refreshing to see after spending time in the generally grey metropolis of Beijing, where most trees had already dropped their leaves. From here the path bifurcated into a deep forest covering the ridgeline of the hill, and I took the path that went around its eastern side, all the while catching glimpses of what lay on the other side of the ridge through the leaves and branches. At certain vantage points, I could get a good view of Kunming Lake, the vast body of water that occupied about three-quarters of the Summer Palace. It was a striking sight made even more impressive by its origins: the lake was manually excavated across some 2.2 square kilometres, with the displaced earth piled up over time until it swelled into what is now Longevity Hill.
As I made my way down to the other side of the hill, I came across a series of palace buildings that led into a grand covered wooden walkway called the Changlang, or Long Corridor. I strolled along it for what felt like forever; the winding corridor traced the edge of Kunming Lake for some 728 metres, with nearly every beam in the structure adorned with vivid caihua murals. My gaze stayed fixed on the ceilings and rafters as I walked, taking in a cascade of scenes - Sun Wukong battling Nezha, Zhang Fei’s exploits from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Battle of Zhuxian County between the Song and Jin dynasties, and countless others. The sheer number and density of murals here was staggering to witness; around 14,000 paintings, no two alike, every single one illustrating scenes from classical Chinese novels, myths, and landscapes. I loved this place, it's a seriously stunning piece of architecture and probably the finest collection of mural paintings I've seen anywhere.
The corridor opened up into a large palatial complex that spilled down the south-facing end of the hill. In its centre sat the Foxiang Ge (Tower of Buddhist Incense), a lovely 3-story, 41-metre tall pagoda jutting out from a 20-metre stone platform built straight into the slope of Longevity Hill, surrounded by a rambling complex of palace buildings, courtyards and steles. I laboriously ascended the over 400 steps leading to the tower, and was rewarded with increasingly gorgeous views over the palatial complex and Kunming Lake as I went. The top of the stone platform was occupied by a small courtyard overwhelmingly dominated by the bulk of the pagoda; through some opened windows I could see into the interior of the structure, where a finely-wrought bronze sculpture of the Thousand-Hand Guanyin Bodhisattva stood surrounded by religious polychrome paintings. This would have been Empress Dowager Cixi's private place of worship back in the days of the Qing Dynasty, but considering how many steps there are and how crotchety that woman looks I can only assume she could only access the pagoda by being carried.
There's a lot more I could discuss about the Summer Palace since the grounds are huge, but I assume you're tired of my superlatives by now so I'll just say that I really liked this palace, far more than I did the Forbidden City. Personally I think Asian palaces are at their most beautiful when they look naturalistic and follow the contours of the landscape on which they're built (another good example is Changdeokgung in downtown Seoul). The Forbidden City, with all its strict symmetry and rigid layout, felt a bit regular and repetitive after a while. The Summer Palace, though, is the complete opposite; more relaxed, more varied, and just a lot nicer to wander through. It blends imperial architecture with Tibetan influences and takes a lot of cues from classical Chinese gardens south of the Yangtze, and the whole place ends up feeling surprisingly natural and intimate. It's an amazing place.
At the end of the day, as I got onto the high-speed train leading out of the old imperial capital (that's a really good word to describe the city in general: "imperial"), I left feeling like I had only seen a small portion of what there was to see; the city in many places is practically overrun with interesting old buildings and monuments from the Ming and Qing dynasty. But that's all juxtaposed against a backdrop of increasing modernity - throughout my visit I couldn't help but notice that the contrast between the old and the new was extremely stark, with towering skyscrapers and ten-lane thoroughfares giving way to authentic lived-in temples from the Qing dynasty and backstreets of old hutongs that barely even seemed modernised, where an increasingly elderly demographic still lived like they would have in an earlier era even as the city mutated around them. You can be delivered lunch by an automated system one second and be surrounded by deteriorating communist-era infrastructure the next. It's a really strange mix. As cliche as it is, the Anthony Bourdain quote about China is true: "The one thing I know for sure about China is I will never know China. It’s too big, too old, too diverse, too deep. There’s simply not enough time."
The suburbs of Beijing gradually faded away, and before long the train slipped into the night.
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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This time we're talking about Lawrenceville. As a housekeeping note, from here on I'm going to just keep moving east to fill out the East End. The next installment will fill in the gap between here and Oakland, discussing the neighborhoods of Bloomfield, Garfield, and Friendship. After that I haven't decided whether to cover the North Side or South Hills next, but I'll be concluding with the West End, possibly in one installment, because we don’t talk about the West End. Just forget I mentioned it. I enjoy writing these, and I realize that the limited geographic extent of the city proper doesn't tell the whole story, so I plan on continuing into surrounding municipalities after this is done as a sort of companion series.
I realized when I was making my maps this time that we're starting to get a bit far afield, and for those of you following along at home with no frame of reference, I've made a half-assed overview map showing the general locations of the areas we've discussed thus far. As usual, I've included various links to Google Streetview and other stuff that I've found worth linking. Since this is probably the last one of these I'll complete before Easter, I've hidden an Easter Egg in the links. Good luck finding it!
Series Index:
- Intro
- Downtown
- Strip District
- North Shore
- South Side
- Hill District: Lower Hill
- Hill District: Middle Hill
- Hill District: The Projects
- The Hill’s Environs: Uptown, Sugar Top, and Polish Hill
- Oakland
10. Lawrenceville: A Case Study in Gentrification
When I came to New York to live in 1970, I moved into a downtown industrial district which, because it was south of Houston St., was christened SoHo. Now, in those days, there were two art galleries in SoHo. There were two Italian bars, no restaurants, no tourists, and quite a lot of peace and quiet. Today, nine years later, there are something like 75 galleries at last count, dozens of restaurants and bars, and on weekends, when the peering hordes of dentists from New Jersey come down here to take their Gucci loafers for a walk among the bubble-top buses, there is very little peace and quiet indeed.
Robert Hughes
In the spring of 2007, like many young adults, I had what could be called standing weekend plans with friends from college, where things weren't planned so much as there was an understanding that we were all going to hang out. One Friday night, I had intended to go with the flow when I got a call from a friend from high school asking if I wanted to go to the Derek Trucks concert. After the show ended, looking for something to do, I called my college buddies, and they told me they were at a dance party at a bar in Lawrenceville. Lawrenceville? I was certainly familiar with the place, but it didn't exactly seem like the kind of place where one would hang out.
To analogize: Imagine that you're a normal, middle-class, suburban American and a couple you know invites you to go on vacation with them. When you express interest, they tell you that the destination is Azerbaijan. If you're like most Americans, you know very little about this country and probably couldn't point to it on a map, and any research you do will make it seem at least a little iffy, even if it's obviously not North Korea. We ended up going and having a good time, though on the way home my friend told me that the place had an "interesting clientele", and this was coming from a white guy with dreads.
Ten years later, Lawrenceville would be the hottest neighborhood in the city.
10A. An Historical Introduction
Like Roman Gaul, Lawrenceville is divided into three parts, the official designations referring to their position along the river, with Lower Lawrenceville being the farthest downstream, Upper Lawrenceville being the farthest upstream, and Central Lawrenceville being between them. While these official names are in common use today, old-timers refer to Lower, Central, and Upper Lawrenceville as the 6th, 9th, and 10th Wards, respectively, although the wards themselves don't perfectly match the neighborhood boundaries. As far as those boundaries are concerned, the Allegheny River forms a clear western boundary, the southern boundary is at 33rd St., and the northern boundary is at the 62nd St. Bridge. To the east, wooded hillsides and Allegheny Cemetery provide a distinct boundary for the upper section, while the lower sections trail indistinctly into neighboring Bloomfield.
The only Indian settlement we know of within city limits was a Delaware village called Shannopin's Town, which was abandoned by the early 1770s. In 1814 Colonel William Foster, father of songwriter Stephen Foster, laid out Lawrenceville around the intersection of the Greensburg and Butler pikes in what was then Pitt Township. That same year, the Federal government established the Allegheny Arsenal between what is now 39th and 40th Streets, the site chosen as it was within America's only iron-producing region. The arsenal was decommissioned in 1907, but its name still endures as a symbol of the neighborhood; there's Arsenal Park, Arsenal Middle School, Arsenal Lanes, Arsenal Cider House, the 15201 Zip Code is addressed as Pittsburgh but is formally Arsenal Station, etc. Lawrenceville was incorporated as an independent borough in 1834 and was incorporated into Pittsburgh in 1868. From there, it's history is similar to that of the adjoining Strip District; its location along the river fostered burgeoning industry, and in the latter half of the century it was populated by immigrant groups, Germans at first, followed by Poles, Croats, Slovenes, and Slovaks. Population peaked in 1900, at around 33,000.
And then began a long, slow decline. Popular histories tend to treat Pittsburgh's industrial age as a homogenous behemoth, but geography was a factor at the local level, and the Allegheny Valley peaked early and went into decline well before the region as a whole. The initial wave of industrialization was marked by a lot of smaller firms who set up shop anywhere with convenient river access, the Allegheny Valley having a small advantage due to proximity to the old Pennsylvania Canal. As these nascent industries matured, economies of scale began to favor large, integrated mills for which there was no room in the narrow Allegheny Valley. Focus shifted to the wider Mon (and to a lesser extent, the Ohio), which had the added bonus of being the primary corridor for bulk coal shipment. Carnegie Steel's Lucy Furnace, as well as the adjacent Crucible Steel, were state-of-the art when they opened in the 1870s. By the time US Steel bought Carnegie in 1903, they were showing their age, and as the 20th century got underway, they couldn't compete with the sprawling complexes at Braddock and Homestead, and the Depression killed them for good.
At this point, everyone just sort of forgot about Lawrenceville. Small-scale industry remained, but most of the skilled labor followed the mills. The housing stock was already seen as outdated by the 1930s, and when the suburbanization trend got underway in the 1950s and 1960s, residents who could afford to decamped, particularly to the suburb of Shaler, just across the river. While it never saw the wholesale population collapse of the Strip District, the Strip was able to reinvent itself as a hub of warehousing and wholesale. Lawrenceville would have no second act. It was too far off the radar to see any urban renewal efforts during Renaissance I (which was more focused on industry than history remembers), and it lacked the cohesion among its residents necessary to get redevelopment money during Flaherty's Neighborhood Renaissance of the 1970s. As a man who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s told me last summer: "I grew up in Highland Park. If you couldn't afford to live in Highland Park, you moved to East Liberty. If that was still too expensive, you moved to Bloomfield. If things got really desperate you moved to Garfield, and when all hope was lost, you moved to Lawrenceville."
When the TV show COPS first came to Pittsburgh in the early 1990s, Lawrenceville was one of the neighborhoods they frequented. The major crimes rate, which was about 4.5% per capita in the mid-1970s, had risen to 8% per capita by the early 2000s. By comparison, the Hill District was around 7% in the 1970s and was considered a no-go zone. The bulk of this increase came in the mid-1990s and is largely believed to be due to a demographic cliff that appeared to be a significant impediment to the neighborhood's improvement. In 2006, 40% of owner-occupied housing was owned by people 70 and older. While housing prices had appreciated, the city's population was declining, and the market was still soft by the standards of the city as a whole. And this appreciation was largely driven by urban pioneers purchasing larger homes with intact historical details. These homes were not representative of the neighborhood's housing stock as a whole, which was modest and had been remuddled beyond belief. Even if these homes could be purchased on the cheap, the cost of renovation was disproportionate to the value one could expect to get from a small house in a questionable neighborhood. As the owner-occupied housing became vacant, there was substantial concern that supply would outstrip the market.
Ironically enough, the time Lawrenceville was bottoming out coincided with the nascent beginning of its revival. It's hard to pinpoint when the artistic set first started taking an interest in Lawrenceville, but Art All Night, an annual event with the motto "No censorship. No juries. No admission." was first held in an abandoned warehouse in Lawrenceville in 1998. While a single annual show does not a revival make, there were other nascent signs of development. By 2002 long-term residents were noting an increase in business activity on the lower end of Butler St., but this was counterbalanced by those who were only noticing an increase in drug dealing. Mayor Murphy floated a plan to redevelop the waterfront area in 1999, but this seems to have gone nowhere, and was bundled as part of an ambitious set of plans to redevelop multiple areas, including the old J&L site that later became South Side Works.
Between 2003 and 2006, nine art galleries, five restaurants, two clothing boutiques, and two coffee shops opened on Butler St. The median home price, which sat at a mere $25,000 in 1999, jumped to $35,000 by 2004. With the benefit of hindsight, it's quite tempting to mark this period as the beginning of a turnaround and say that the rest is history. At the time, though, this was far from certain. As we will see in later installments, every neighborhood is unique, and every neighborhood has unique factors that could determine a revival's success or failure. We know now that the revival was successful in this case, but there's probably a 50/50 chance that any nascent revival fizzles. And there were factors at play suggesting that Lawrenceville's odds might have been significantly worse.
Given what was already going on with respect to housing, this had the potential to be disastrous. While the urban pioneers showed little interest in these houses, absentee landlords did. In 2003 they purchased four out of every five residential properties sold. The median price was $19,000. By 2005 it was already apparent that the neighborhood had become attractive to low-income renters. The impending market saturation of undesirable properties, combined with landlords who didn't screen tenants and only made repairs when the situation was desperate, could easily have not only increased the crime rate but, more importantly, added to the already negative perception of the neighborhood's safety. Needless to say, this did not end up happening, and I intend to address the question of why it didn't later in the essay. But I wanted to make clear up from that the turnaround was never a sure thing.
That takes us up to 2007, when I began visiting the area regularly. It was much grittier and grimier than it is now, but it wasn't seriously unsafe, except above the cemetery, where it was seriously unsafe. There were plenty of hipsters in the neighborhood, but it was mostly a working class white area with a few more black faces on the streets than suburbanites would be comfortable with. The bar I mentioned in the intro may have been a hipster's paradise at 11 pm, but at 5 pm it was blue collar workers who had finished their shift. And it opened at 7 am; it was like the bar the stevedores visit in Season 2 of The Wire, except dingier. We didn't go there because it was trendy, but because it was cheap, and we were poor.
At this point, there was no real animosity between the newcomers and the old timers. The g-word hadn't entered the popular lexicon at this point, and to the extent that it had, it referred to developer-led projects meant to bring rich white people into poor black areas. The same thing that was happening in Lawrenceville had been happening in the South Side since the 90s, and by 2007 it was just starting to yuppify. While, like Lawrenceville, the South Side's fortunes started to change after it had become a haven for artists, it also had an inordinate density of liquor licenses, due to grandfathering from the days when the J&L works was there; its popularity among young adults was credited to its prominence as a nightlife district. There was no comparison to be made. The idea that students, artists, and twenty-something bohemians would make an area expensive seemed absurd. Pittsburgh, after all, was not New York.
The inflection point was around 2011, which is also when the neighborhood got direct bus service to Oakland. At this time, I was visiting a friend of mine who lived there almost every weekend and noticed a lot more normal-looking people on the streets, and even a few yuppie types. We found ourselves mostly hanging out at his house as opposed to going out, and when we did go out, it was to a place on a residential block with a six-foot ceiling and linoleum tile floor filled with cigarette smoke and unhappy Lawrencevillians. Illustratively, one of my friends who was desperately trying to be one of the cool kids was, by that point, in Lawrenceville constantly. A friend from high school who lived in the city and didn't care for this guy said he couldn't go to Lawrenceville anymore because simply being on Butler St. meant he was guaranteed to run into him and have to talk to him. Lawrenceville was cool before, but so were a lot of other places, and the fact that my friend was going there to the exclusion of other places meant that it was simply The Place to Be.
In the fall of 2013, one of my law school classmates passed away, and her husband held a memorial benefit at Arsenal Lanes that ended up serving as a sort of class reunion. I found myself hanging out with normie friends whom I didn't hang out with as much as my non-law school friends because they always went to the South Side, or Oakland, or other places that had a more college, "loud drinking" atmosphere. Lawrenceville certainly never hosted any of the weekly Bar Review outings or any official school social events. When we were sitting in the lounge in the back, one of my friends remarked "Lawrenceville has really come a long way in the past few years." I told her that I had been coming here since law school; in fact, the reason I didn't hang out with them more was because I preferred coming here, and that I had invited them here several times but there was no interest. She said she never thought of me as a tastemaker, and I must be cooler than she thought. I wasn't going to deny this, so I nodded in agreement, but even I was late to the party.
After the event ended, we were looking for a place to have an afterparty, and I suggested one of my old haunts, to give them a taste of what had now become the new old Lawrenceville, which was a safer bet than giving them a taste of the actual old Lawrenceville. This was quickly vetoed, and instead we went to a place called Industry Public House, which they were familiar with but I, a veteran of the neighborhood (at least as a visitor), had never heard of. It was awful. It was the same kind of Loud Drinking establishment they would have gone to on the South Side five years earlier except priced for someone with a full-time job. The truth is, while my friend may have acted like she wanted to be the kind of early adopter that I apparently was, neither she nor anyone else in that group would have liked the Lawrenceville of 2007. Drinking 50 cent drafts in a place with Bob Seger blasting on the jukebox was just not their style.
I remember reading a magazine article some years back where a young, hip woman was complaining about gentrification in Brooklyn, how it used to be cool and now it was expensive and full of yuppies in SUVs. The author was keen to point out that she had no right to complain, as she was the gentrifier, the outsider who moved into a neighborhood of working-class Jews and made it trendy through her presence. It's easy to sneer about insufferable, it's-not-gentrification-until-the-Republicans-move-in scenesters, but the girl had a point. It was that night in Industry that the feeling that I was becoming alienated from the neighborhood fully crystalized. It explains why my friend and I hadn't been as keen to head to Butler St. as we had been a few years prior, even if the same places were still there. He had, in the meantime, moved to the Upper portion of the neighborhood, which was beginning to turn but wasn't there yet. The following decade would see a mad scramble for condo developments, high-end restaurants opening, older bars going non-smoking, and various other gentrification milestones passed. The press coverage changed. In the early 2000s, there were conflicting views among residents as to whether the arts scene was turning the neighborhood around or if things were still getting worse. Now it was "Best Bars in Lawrenceville" or "Best Places to Eat in Lawrenceville" and Lawrenceville started appearing on lists of best neighborhoods and places tourists should check out.
10B. Lower Lawrenceville: The Sixth Ward
As I mentioned earlier, Lower Lawrenceville is the part of the neighborhood furthest downstream. It runs from 33rd St. to 40th St. south to north, bounded by the Allegheny River on the west. These boundaries are not arbitrary. 33rd St. is the corporate limit of old Lawrenceville Borough, and is the location of a rail trestle that spans the road. A block later Butler St. splits off of Penn Ave. to continue following the river at Doughboy Square, where the neighborhood starts in earnest. The other end was the site of the former Allegheny Arsenal, which occupied all the land between the river and Penn excepting a pass-through at Butler St. While the arsenal itself was decommissioned in 1907, the area to the east of Butler St. was given over to institutional uses including a park and a school, while the area along the river was taken over by industry. The result was that there had long been a fairly large gap in the commercial district that created a natural dividing line, though this gap was recently bridged by the Arsenal 201 complex, at least on the river side of the street (the school isn't going anywhere any time soon). The eastern boundary is a little more indistinct, but it's roughly in the vicinity of the East Busway and the associated ravine. This is the first neighborhood we've looked at in a while where the official boundaries make sense. Actually, they make more sense than the traditional designation used by old-timers in Lawrenceville, which is to refer to this section as the 6th Ward, which, while true, also includes Polish Hill and part of the Strip District.
The section between Butler Street and the river, referred to as "below Butler", is mostly an extension of the same light industrial and warehouse fabric that comprises the upper Strip District. Closer to Butler, there are a few streets of Italianate row houses with some more modern infill mixed in. I initially thought this was the remnant of a larger area—the city has a history of demolishing residential areas near the river for industrial expansion—but old maps show that it was never much larger than it is today.
Butler Street itself is the commercial heart of Lawrenceville. The area began suffering a vacancy problem as early as the 1960s, when the proposed Oakland-Crosstown Expressway included an interchange in the area that would require substantial demolition, and merchants were reluctant to invest. While the project was ultimately cancelled, government leaders were treating it as a done deal until well into the 1970s, when Federal money for urban freeways dried up. In the meantime, the decade-plus of disinvestment and lack of any demand for revitalization led conditions to stay more or less the same into the 2000s. The result was that this was the earliest part of Lawrenceville to gentrify. At the time I started hanging out here in 2007, it was already rebounding, almost exclusively with gentrified businesses, though the side of the street closer to the river was still oddly blighted. Since then there have been a ton of infill projects, and while I'm not hip to any particular plans, it wouldn't surprise me if the few remaining empty lots are filled in within the next decade.
The hillside between Butler and Penn contains another residential area dominated by 19th century brick rowhouses. This is a highly desirable area due to its proximity to Butler St., though there had been significant blight and neglect in the past. As real estate prices began to rise in the 2000s most of the more desirable houses were renovated and new construction was built on vacant lots. As prices began to skyrocket in the 2010s, some of the smaller, more distressed houses were demolished in favor of modern, expensive infill. While I'm not a huge fan of the style of these, they're still superior to the dilapidated crap that they replaced, and I'd consider them an improvement on the whole.
While Lawrenceville is most associated with Butler St., Penn Ave. is also a major thoroughfare through the neighborhood, though it's a bit of a mishmash. Leaving the intersection with Butler at Doughboy Square, it once contained an extension of the Butler St. business district. While there's still some of this left right at the square, most of this was demolished in the 90s in favor of a semi-suburban housing development. While this may seem like an abomination now, at the time these were built they had no idea the neighborhood was going to stage a comeback, and the units sold for relatively high prices. The problem I have with them isn't so much with the architecture itself, as it blends in with the existing fabric, as it is with the fact that the building entrances are all on walkways on the sides. The overall effect is that it looks like you're seeing the backs of the buildings from Penn when you're really seeing the fronts. The actual rears look like suburban townhouses, since the builders didn't spring for brick or any kind of contextual detail, though this isn't really a problem since they're on an alley and obscured by garages anyway. The remaining section of Penn has random abandoned storefronts, houses, and and industrial-style buildings, some of which include destination businesses like Pints on Penn. On the whole, though, Penn doesn't have a walkable business district until you get closer to 40th St., though this is in Central Lawrenceville, about which more later.
Finally, the residential area between Penn and Liberty has lagged behind the rest of Lawrenceville as far as desirability is concerned. While there is still a fair amount of brick, the frame rows more common to adjacent Bloomfield begin to predominate here, and the housing itself is modest and particularly susceptible to mid-century remuddling. It's slowly becoming more popular as people get priced out of Lawrenceville proper, but it's a long walk to Butler St., and, as I just mentioned, there aren't many amenities on Penn. Liberty is even worse, as drivers treat it as a high-speed quasi-highway, and the only business of note is the Church Brew Works. Back in the 90s, when microbreweries were a new thing, this place was trendy, particularly because of the novelty of housing it in a disused church, with vats on the altar and the confessional turned into a large liquor cabinet. As the beer scene evolved, though, this place did not. I went to a wedding reception there a few years ago and the beer was lousy and the food somehow worse.
Neighborhood Grade: Gentrified. The Butler St. business district consists almost entirely of high-end restaurants, boutiques, and the like, and home prices are outrageous. While I'm adamant that the section between Penn and Liberty is less desirable, market momentum and the demand for anything within the Lawrenceville boundaries has meant that, in recent years, these houses go for as much as those in better parts, and while the exteriors haven't been demuddled en masse, the interiors are absolutely top hole. Prices here rival those of the most desirable suburbs. I also feel obligated to note somewhere that there was a period when they tried to brand this area as LoLa, possibly because they thought that every arts district should be named in the same style as Soho (which itself wasn't known as such until it began gentrifying), e.g. TriBeCa, SoDo (Seattle), NoDa (Charlotte), LoDo (Denver), SoMa (San Francisco), SoWa (Boston), but thankfully it never caught on.
10C. Central Lawrenceville: The Ninth Ward
The Tenth Ward boundaries are pretty analogous to the official boundaries of Central Lawrenceville, which is mostly just referred to as Lawrenceville without any geographic identifier. The river is an obvious boundary, but the northern and southern boundaries are also distinct, as the section runs from the break in the street wall at the old arsenal site up to the Allegheny Cemetery at Stanton Ave. This is another natural break, as the cemetery prevents development on its side of the street. The eastern boundary is definite as well, as it runs along the back side of the cemetery to Penn Ave., which it includes until we're back at 40th St. The only minor alteration I would make to the official boundary is that I would include both sides of the Penn Ave. business district, since nobody would ever consider one side of a commercial street to be in one neighborhood and the other side to be in another.
While all of Lawrenceville is dominated by rowhouses, this is especially true in Central Lawrenceville, the only census unit in the city where the majority of the housing is single family attached. While the city has many rowhouse neighborhoods, Central Lawrenceville is that there has little of anything else. There are some apartments above commercial storefronts, the mid-century Davison Square Apartments, and the newer The Foundry @ 41st, but those are isolated instances. The section can be further divided between the area along the river, Below Butler, and the area on the hill, Above Butler. The area right along the river is still primarily industrial, but this is mostly unobtrusive stuff like the CMU Robotics Lab and a Red Bull warehouse. The residential area below Butler is almost exclusively 19th century rowhouses, though there has been some infill in recent decades. This area was traditionally less desirable due to proximity to industry and susceptibility to flooding, a condition that remained well into the 2000s. The diminution of heavy industry combined with the flood control dams built in the decades following WWII have eliminated these concerns, and due to the flatter topography and proximity to Butler St., this is now the more desirable area. Above Butler, however, contains some of the better housing. Fisk, Main, and 40th Streets were historically occupied by the managerial class of industrial workers, and the houses are larger and more ornate than those elsewhere. This was the earliest area to gentrify, as the size of the houses combined with intact historical details made them desirable to the urban pioneers discussed in the introductory section. The remainder of the hillside is mixed, with more modest row houses. Some houses weren't built out until the early 20th century, leading to oddities like bungalow rowhouses.
As with Lower Lawrenceville, Butler St. is the main commercial district, but it differs here from other areas in that it still retains some of the old Lawrenceville feel. Unlike Lower Lawrenceville and, as we will see later, Upper Lawrenceville, this business district was historically more stable and never saw much in the way of blight and abandonment. The result is that it's much more functional than in a typical gentrified neighborhood. In the introductory installment of this series, I made a distinction between functional businesses and destination businesses. The former are the kinds of things that everyone needs nearby but that no one would travel to seek out. The latter are things that nobody needs nearby but will draw in outsiders. Most gentrified businesses are destination businesses. I would further argue that destination businesses didn't begin to take on prominence until the 1970s, and weren't viewed as widespread attractions until the 1990s.
Suppose you were designing a city from scratch, like in Sim City. We'll take that there will be large employment centers for granted, and we'll also take for granted that there will be large residential concentrations, whether clustered around employment centers (as before WWII), or spread out among bedroom communities (as after WWII). It's your job to decide which businesses will go where. The way city planners traditionally looked at these things was that they'd take an area's population and figure out their needs and the frequency of those needs, along with what the neighborhood could support. Large amenities, of the type that a city can only support one, would go in a centrally-located downtown, and these were things like major department stores that were really entities in and of themselves. From there you'd look at things like grocery stores, bars, restaurants, gas stations, and the like and space them out in commercial clusters depending on the population, income, and projected demand of the area.
Even after World War II, as the automobile greatly improved mobility, these businesses could be spaced farther apart and serve larger areas, but the same principle remained. Most of our business is conducted within a short distance of our home or workplace. Prior to the 1990s, this was true of virtually all business. There might occasionally be a restaurant or store that you needed to travel to, but even these would be in arbitrary locations, excepting, of course, the large, regional amenities. What was new in the 1970s and took off in the 1990s was the idea that there were entire areas that people would travel to so that they could patronize businesses of the same general type for which they almost certainly had more convenient alternatives. On a recent Saturday I drove 20 miles to go to a brewery, at which I meant people who had driven even farther. In the 1950s, the idea that someone would drive that far to get a beer would seem ridiculous, unless they lived in a rural area and that was the distance to the nearest bar.
When we look at Pittsburgh, this dynamic first became expressed in the South Side. When J&L Steel built its sprawling mill there in the 19th century, employees had little choice but to live within walking distance, and the density was high enough to support a massive business district. Even as suburbanization went into full gear in the 1950s, the South Side's business district remained intact, because it was still close to a center of employment. It wasn't until the steel industry crash of the 1980s and the mill's closure in 1985 that vacancies started rising. The South Side's 1990s gentrification and subsequent rebranding was largely based in the reality that the kind of business that did best in close proximity of a steel mill was a tavern, and the high concentration of liquor licenses meant that the place could be rebranded as a nightlife district.
To the extent that Pittsburgh would have had a dedicated nightlife district in the 1950s it would have easily been Downtown, but that made sense because it was the center of activity for the region. A few years earlier you could have thrown the Hill District in the mix, but that would have also made sense since one would expect jazz clubs to be in an area with a large black population, especially in an era when they wouldn't have been tolerated Downtown. A few years later you may have said Oakland, but that would have made sense as well, because of the college population. But there was nothing about the bars in the 1980s South Side that held any particular appeal to an outsider, and by the time it became the center of Pittsburgh nightlife in the 1990s it made no sense because it didn't serve any particular population.
Likewise, Lawrenceville as a destination makes no sense. When the Planning Department did a survey of the city's shopping districts in 1965, it used the same logic as described above, making recommendations based on population and demographics. The Central Lawrenceville shopping district was thriving at the time, but the others weren't, and based on the data, there was little reason to do anything. Central didn't need help, and the others weren't worth saving. And this was in an era when the population of Lawrenceville was more than double what it is today. Of course, back then, the idea that anyone who didn't live in Lawrenceville would come there to shop didn't enter planners' minds, because it didn't make sense.
I know it seems like I veered way off track with that long digression, but the goal of this series is to see what we can learn about urban dynamics through a comprehensive examination of a city's neighborhoods. I was a history major in college, and coming up with viable theses drove me out of my mind, as the deeper I got into research the more evidence I'd uncover that didn't quite fit. Good historians understand that this evidence needs to be addressed and the thesis modified accordingly. Bad historians (and most pop historians) ignore this evidence or bend it to fit whatever just-so story their ideology warrants. Most discussions of urban dynamics I see online are based around case studies that are used to support just-so stories. In this installment, I'm trying to answer the question of why Lawrenceville turned around. But the broader question is "Why did Lawrenceville turn around, why didn't other neighborhoods turn around even though they seemed in better position to do so at the time, and what lessons can we learn from all of this?"
If you were in city government in the 1960s, you'd be witnessing suburbanization happening at a frightening pace and a reorganization of life around the automobile. The purpose of the 1965 report was to prioritize the use of city resources to stem this tide by ensuring that residents were provided with adequate shopping facilities, which, by 1960s standards, meant street improvements for better ingress and egress and expanded parking facilities. But the document contains a tacit admission that some areas simply aren't worth investing in, as investment is not supported by demographic trends. 30 years later the script had flipped and the goal became attracting the suburbanite who would normally just go to the mall. Redo the old squid port with high-end chain stores. Tear down a low-rent commercial district at Fifth and Forbes and replace it with a high-end one.
In the last installment, I roasted the armchair urbanists for their lack of perspective. Here, I reserve my ire for professionals and politicians. As a disclaimer, I have no formal training in public policy. But Lawrenceville's revival does not fit either of these planning narratives. Robert Hughes may have recognized the Soho effect in 1979, but he was an art critic, so what did he know? Real planners know that revitalization only happens if you bring in big developers and hold 175 public meetings where said developers show Power Points with shiny renderings and talk about affordable housing and ground floor retail with rents so high that the only businesses able to afford losing money operating there are national chains. Central Lawrenceville still had an intact functional business district. It also had a few vacant storefronts, and Lower Lawrenceville had a lot of vacant storefronts. There are a lot of reasons I believe Lawrenceville was able to turn around, but chief among them is the combination of the two.
Gentrified businesses do not often displace functional businesses. Instead, they either occupy vacant storefronts or displace other gentrified businesses. Functional businesses are boring but necessary. Destination businesses are fun but superfluous. What Lawrenceville had was a core of functional businesses that could provide necessities without requiring one to leave the neighborhood or even get in a car. If this is all it had, though, it would have just been another boring working class area that no one gave a second thought about; indeed that's what it was for most of its history. But it also had the vacant storefronts necessary to allow something more fun to move in. And the rent was cheap, which meant it could attract the kind of entrepreneur that couldn't afford other areas. I suspect the reason so many of these huge boondoggle developments fail is because they focus on the headline-grabbing destination businesses without taking into consideration that man cannot live on fun alone. So Lawrenceville is the kind of place where you can not only go out to eat, get coffee, and shop in a boutique, but also go to the dentist, optician, bank, drugstore, pick up a bottle at the Wine & Spirits. There are also things to do off Butler commercially. There are several scattered bars around, including places like Kelly's Corner, one of the few remaining old Lawrenceville establishments.
There's also the entirely separate Penn/Main business district, which it technically shares with Bloomfield but I'm including here in its entirety. This business district is of especial note because it includes Children's Hospital, built in 2009. I did not mention this in the introduction, because I personally do not believe that it's relevant, but media reports at the time suggested that the hospital's construction would spur Lawrenceville's revival, and media reports in the years since have fueled that assumption. This is complete hogwash. City planners are incapable of admitting that things happen absent their direction and instead created a just-so story to give them the credit. The theory goes that when the hospital opened it created demand that spurred doctors and other medical professionals to move to the area, increasing housing prices and revitalizing the business district. Aside from the ironic fact that city planners have traditionally treated hospitals as they do prisons, necessary evils that should be quarantined from polite society to the extent possible, and that there are plenty of places with similar amenities that have not seen any kind of turnaround (Uptown has a major hospital and a large-ish university), they seem to forgotten that there was a hospital on this exact site until 2002. The old St. Francis Hospital shut down, UPMC purchased it, and reconstructed/made additions to the buildings for use as a new Children's Hospital (which moved out of Oakland).
The surrounding business district had taken a hit when St. Francis closed, but the area was already on the rebound within a few years, and the damage was limited. Brillobox opened on Penn in 2005 and quickly became one the focal points of culture in Pittsburgh. By that I mean it was filled with hipsters. While it's technically on the Bloomfield side of the street it's realistically as much of a sign of and reason for the neighborhood's revival as anything else. This district is also notable for Wilson's Pharmacy. I haven't been in here and I imagine it's no different than any other pharmacy, but it's notable for the exterior, which apparently hasn't changed since the 40s.
As a final note before we leave Central Lawrenceville, Allegheny Cemetery is huge and, aside from being the final resting place of numerous prominent Pittsburghers, is also an unofficial park for the neighborhood. The whole thing is filled with sculptures and is impeccably landscaped, so it's common for residents to walk dogs here and even picnic among the tombstones. There are also a ton of deer here that are out of bounds for even the city's culling program (by virtue of it being private property), which means that I've seen bigger racks here on bucks than anywhere else.
Neighborhood Grade: Gentrified. 106 44th St. has 3 beds, 3 baths, and 1,785 square feet of living space. It sold for $8,000 in 2007. It sold for $424,900 in 2025. One thing I want to point out about the neighborhood grades: One of the criteria I had initially considered when determining if an area had "fully gentrified" or not was housing prices. The idea was that gentrifying areas had passed the tipping point where you couldn't find real deals anymore, but they were still cheaper than fully gentrified, stable upper middle class neighborhoods. The upper middle class designation would thus be for places where the neighborhood was past the point where anyone but those with means would be able to afford an existing house, and even rehabs were past the point where individuals could both afford them and afford the necessary renovations.
This may work in some contexts, for some neighborhoods, but Lawrenceville isn't one of them. Lawrenceville gentrified because hip, arty people made it trendy, and it's still trendy today because it's still the place to be if you consider yourself at least moderately hip. With that being said, it feels like it's on borrowed time more than it did, say, five or ten years ago. I suspect that the explosion of luxury condo and apartment developments in the Strip District took some of the pressure off, and there are enough working-class holdovers and bohemian types who moved in during the 2000s to prevent the neighborhood from being dominated by high-income tech and finance workers. But the business district is increasingly dominated by, and known for, high-end restaurants and bars, and there are stories of rent increases forcing out the small boutiques and art galleries that made Lawrenceville what it was. I don't want to put a timeline on when it will cross over into full-blown Yuppie territory, because that's dependent on complicated city dynamics and is tied to the fate of other neighborhoods, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happens sooner rather than later.
10D. Upper Lawrenceville: The Tenth Ward
The part of Lawrenceville upstream of Stanton Ave. has always been the redheaded stepchild of the neighborhood. The vast expanse of Allegheny Cemetery and the sparse development on the opposite side of the street pose more of a barrier than the old arsenal, meaning that there was always a significant degree of separation between here and the main business district. At its furthest extent, beyond 57th St., development thins considerably as the valley narrows, and the neighborhood terminates at the 62nd St. Bridge. While the river is an obvious boundary, on the inland side Upper Lawrenceville is separated from adjoining neighborhoods by a steep hillside, which not only provides a well-defined boundary but also limits road connections to these places.
Historically, this was the last part of Lawrenceville to be built out. The earliest development dates to the 1870s, but that was limited to blocks close to Butler around 51st St. From there, development expanded both upstream and uphill, but it wasn't fully built out until the 1930s. As a result, the area looks different from the rest of Lawrenceville, as it isn't as dominated by brick rowhouses, and it creates an interesting effect as you go uphill. Starting at the streets close to Butler, it's about a 50/50 mix of brick and frame. As you go uphill, you run into an area that was built out during a time when Pittsburgh was expanding rapidly and brick was in short supply. As a result, the houses are mostly frame, though they are still built as rowhouses or near rowhouses, i.e. they are close enough together that they might as well touch. By the 1920s the brick shortage had ended, and as you get higher up brick houses reappear.
Unlike other parts of Lawrenceville, there is very little residential development below Butler, and most of what currently exists is recent development on old industrial sites. The business district also never developed to the extent of Central and Lower Lawrenceville and was suffering vacancy issues as early as the 1960s. That being said, what was built largely remains intact. I was surprised to discover that large gaps in the street wall, which I had presumed to be the result of blight or urban renewal plans gone awry, had actually always been there. The residential section seems to have gone into decline as early as the 1920s, with better-off residents first moving to the adjacent neighborhoods of Morningside and Stanton Heights, and later to the nearby suburb of Shaler. The city planners of the 1960s viewed the area's decline as an inevitability and recommended that the remaining businesses relocate to Central Lawrenceville, as the declining population was expected to obviate the need for a business district at all.
The result was that Upper Lawrenceville fell harder than the rest of the neighborhood, and the recovery was slower. As large housing projects began closing in the early 2000s, many of the former residents relocated there (by the middle of the decade, it was nearly 1/3 black). While this didn't lead to any appreciable increase in crime and vice problems, which had been plaguing the neighborhood for decades by that point, it did raise the specter of white flight. When my urban explorations began in earnest around 2007, Upper Lawrenceville was a much rougher place than the rest of Lawrenceville, as it hadn't experienced anything approaching gentrification. Dresden Way, an alley behind Butler, was a well-known site for heroin dealing and was littered with needles. I went to the grocery store once to see if it was any closer than the one I normally went to; it wasn't but even if it were, it was the kind of place where you had to tuck your pants into your socks before entering. The business district was mostly abandoned even into the 2010s, and what was there wasn't glamorous. It looked like the gentrification wave would stop at the cemetery, and Upper Lawrenceville would continue to decline.
These concerns turned out to be misplaced. Real estate agents are known to stretch the boundaries of desirable areas to make properties easier to sell, but here they didn't even have to do that. As Lawrenceville became a watchword, anywhere within the official neighborhood boundaries was fair game, and while Upper Lawrenceville was palpably grittier than the rest of Lawrenceville, once the rest of the neighborhood went from early gentrification to full-on mainstream gentrification, Upper Lawrenceville was primed to take up the slack. As I mentioned earlier, the abandonment without demolition was actually a boon to this process, as it allowed gentrified businesses to move in without having to displace established ones. I mentioned in a post a while back that a friend of mine owned an art gallery. She opened it in Upper Lawrenceville in 2014, by which time she wouldn't have been able to afford a storefront elsewhere on Butler, if she could even find one available.
At present, development has been creeping up Butler St., but it's a slow process. A large, 2 block long gap on the river side of Butler near McCandless Ave. has been filled in with a large retail/apartment complex with 300 units that's supposed to start leasing this year. Assuming this fills up, I'd expect it to play a big role in filling in a lot of the remaining vacancies. Previously, getting above McCandless involved walking past Bottle's Pub, which looked condemned, Conley's Bar, which probably should have been, and a used car lot, before an entire block of nothing surrounded by a chain link fence. There were several fine establishments past there, but the casual pedestrian would be forgiven for turning around at that point. The addition of hundreds of residents, all of whom are presumably moving there for walkability, plus the competed street wall, will hopefully make it economically viable for the remaining vacancies to be filled.
The explosion in new development over the past decade has not been without a downside. As it was the only part of Lawrenceville to have a substantial population of renters, many of the low-income residents have been gentrified out of Lawrenceville altogether. This includes much of the ephemeral black population, who had moved there following project closures and quickly found themselves displaced once again. Lawrenceville United, a neighborhood community organization, became concerned enough that they established a land trust to build homes for moderate income people, but this only resulted in one phase of construction that built seven houses.
Whatever else happens, I don't think development will ever extend past 56th St. In Upper Lawrenceville, Below Butler is dominated by active industries, and past that point they rise up to Butler St. itself and occasionally spill onto the other side, the biggest facility being a Sunoco terminal that would require a massive cleanup even if it were to close. There are some houses along Butler, but the slope above is too steep to support any real development, though there are a few isolated stands of houses that feel like West Virginia. These are officially in either Upper Lawrenceville, Stanton Heights, or Morningside, but they are cut off from the rest of their neighborhoods. These aren't unsafe, though there is some blight, and they can definitely give off a creepy vibe, especially if you go up here at night looking for a place to turn around.
Neighborhood Grade: Gentrified. This area has seen housing appreciation in the past 15 years comparable to the rest of Lawrenceville, but it was starting from a lower base. This combined with the lower-quality housing stock means that it remains more affordable. There was also historically more of a crime problem and a larger contingent of Section 8 renters, and while those problems are mostly in the past at this point, the area still has some of the Old Lawrenceville grittiness that's been completely snuffed out of the rest of the neighborhood. Ten years ago I'd have said that this was still in the early stages of gentrification, but it's passed that point and, if current trends hold, it won't be long before it's similar to the Central and Lower Lawrenceville.
10E. The Soho Effect
Hughes concluded:
In the 19th Century, artists used to live in bohemias which were interesting but not chic. Today, they make places chic by moving into them for a short time until the landlords raise the rent and boot them out again so they have to go somewhere else.
One of the questions I'd like to address in this installment is why Lawrenceville? How does it come to be that a declining, working-class industrial district with serious vice and crime problems manages to, within 15 years, become the city's most in-demand neighborhood? And how does this happen despite decades of neglect from the city? I ask these questions because, since at least the Urban Renewal era, there's been endless talk about this neighborhood and that neighborhood, how the city is pushing development, or developers are pushing development, or neither is happening but this place is in a prime location to take off, and sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't, but while public attention is focused elsewhere, Lawrenceville, a place no one gave any thought to whatsoever, swoops in and steals the limelight.
I think several factors play into this, some which are widely recognized and others which aren't. The most well-recognized factor is what has been dubbed the "SoHo Effect". When Hughes moved to New York in 1970, he didn't just happen to end up in SoHo. Artists had been renting disused industrial lofts for years as they provided inexpensive work space, as well as inexpensive, though illegal, living space. As Hughes moved to the city to take a job as art critic for Time magazine, he would have naturally wanted to live at the epicenter of the New York artistic world. By 1979, word had gotten out and his quiet little corner of Lower Manhattan had become chic.
Is this what happened in Lawrenceville? Partially. The gentrification was initiated by artists, who were then followed by hipsters, and finally by normies. In SoHo there was no intermediate step. What Hughes was complaining about at the end of the 1970s would speed into overdrive in the 1980s, but yuppie culture by its very nature wanted to be close to art culture. Art prices had increased over the past decade, and art became both an investment and a status symbol. While art may have provided the initial spark, describing Lawrenceville as an arts district akin to SoHo would be inaccurate. At last count there were about a dozen galleries, which is enough to host a gallery crawl, but with close to 90 galleries in the city as a whole its share isn't wildly disproportionate.
But more importantly, what happened in SoHo was synthetic. It was urban renewal. SoHo was an industrial district with a lot of abandoned factory space that needed to be repurposed, and it was the idea of city planners to offer professional artists cheap studio space. Lawrenceville didn't have the kind of factory lofts that SoHo did. What industry remained by the end of the century was smaller scale and still in operation. Looking to SoHo as a guide can give us some clues as to why it happened, but it doesn't tell the whole story.
The first factor that often goes uncommented on, which I discussed in detail above, is that its business district was unique in that it retained a functional core but had seen abandonment on the periphery. A neighborhood with only the former may be a nice place to live, but its businesses aren't easily dislodged, and destination businesses will never be able to develop sufficient density to gentrify an entire area. A neighborhood with only the latter is difficult for newcomers to live in, and the lack of existing foot traffic makes it difficult for new businesses to take root. In Lawrenceville, Butler St. provided residents with what they needed, but there was plenty of room for newcomers.
A factor discussed even less is the row house revival. This started in New York in the 1970s and quickly spread to other row house heavy cities—Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Baltimore, and, of course, Pittsburgh. But these early revivalists focused on intact examples that retained their historical details. Pittsburgh had plenty of these on the North Side, which had gone downhill quickly, but Lawrenceville remained working class much longer. By the 1950s, when suburban life became the ideal, small rowhouses were seen as outdated, and residents with cash to spare "modernized" them with new windows, awnings, siding, and other dubious improvements. These homeowners were proud of their modifications at the time, but they aged poorly. When the rowhouse craze started to take off in the 1990s, Pittsburgh still had plenty of intact examples that were large enough to have been chopped up into apartments in the past.
The remuddled, modest stock of Lawrenceville was of little interest to the urban pioneers. When these had all been redone, though, and the market wasn't slowing down, people began to look to other areas. The South Side benefited from this, but was starting to get pricy, and Lawrenceville was the next obvious place to look. I had a roommate who worked at the Warhol, and they had just hired a girl from NYC who wanted to own a row house in the worst way. Except in New York, you were looking at a million bucks for one at that point. In Pittsburgh, however, $100k would get you a nice one. The living room might have wood paneling and a drop ceiling, but your foot was in the door.
And then there's the racial aspect, which is uncomfortable to talk about but can't be ignored. Lawrenceville was white. Lawrenceville had vice problems, drug dealing, and the occasional shooting, but it didn't have gang violence in the same way that more traditional hoods did. More importantly, the white hipsters who moved in didn't feel like outsiders. I touched on this earlier, but there wasn't any friction at the time between old Lawrenceville and the newcomers. I don't want to give away too many spoilers from future installments, but at the same time this was going on, other areas of the city were seeing developers intentionally displacing long-time low-income residents in an attempt to revitalize the neighborhood. For most Pittsburghers at the time, this is what gentrification meant, not working-class white people being replaced by starving artists, students, and recent grads who didn't make a lot of money. That was just low-income white people being replaced by lower income white people, in a neighborhood where parts were already going Section 8.
Finally, we have to look at the context of what else was going on in Pittsburgh at the time. The South Side, which was the city's first trendy, arty area was starting to become yuppified, and its reputation rested primarily upon nightlife. The artistic-minded establishments may not have been driven out by rising rents, but the noise, traffic, and drunkenness made it anathema for anyone over 30 to visit on a Friday or Saturday night. In Oakland, rents were being raised in a deliberate attempt to drive out the counterculture and replace it with chain stores. The population loss the city had been experiencing for decades was beginning to stabilize, and the young people, who were leaving in droves the decade prior, were now sticking around, and wanted to live in the city. By this point, decades of disinvestment meant there were few "nice" areas remaining, and those that did exist were under increasing pressure. There were plenty of neighborhoods like Lawrenceville was at the beginning of the millennium, but there could be no diffuse settlement. Artists may not care where their studio space is so long as the rent is cheap, but if you're young and hip you want to go where the IT people are. Add in the other factors, and there were a few contenders, don't get me wrong, but Lawrenceville was the place everyone agreed on, and there's really nothing more to say.
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I’ve spent the last several months architecting a comprehensive legislative and constitutional package (127 points total) designed to address what I see as the terminal decline of American state capacity and moral coherence.
I am posting this here because I want a "stress test." Most political discussions are about vibes; I want to talk about mechanics.
The Core Pillars:
Institutional Security: Moving oversight to randomly selected Citizen Juries to break the back of the lobbyist/bureaucrat feedback loop.
Economic Anti-Fragility: Forcing a 20% market share cap on corporations to prevent them from becoming "Too Big to Fail" or "Too Big to Regulate."
Axiomatic Anchoring: Grounding the legal system in a Western/Christian moral framework (Life is Sacred) to act as a stable coordination point against value drift.
I used an LLM to help me cross-reference the data and polish the 500+ pages of text, but the architecture and the trade-offs are mine. I’m looking for the "smartest people in the room" to tell me where this breaks.
Note: This post contains unmarked spoilers for Hamnet. For the full experience, read it on Substack.
The Oscars are this evening, not that anyone gives a shit anymore.
The smart money says that, having snagged the equivalent award in the BAFTAs and the Golden Globes, Jessie Buckley is a lock for Best Actress for her starring turn in Chloe Zhao’s period drama Hamnet. I went to see it in the cinema last weekend and can attest that such an accolade would be well-deserved: her performance as Agnes Hathaway1 is an intensely physical (even primal) portrayal of a woman overwhelmed by grief. In a way, the excellent performances from Buckley and Paul Mescal are almost better than the material deserves, elevating a screenplay which struck me as somewhat undeveloped and underwritten. I also think we need a temporary moratorium on Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight”, quickly becoming this generation’s “Adagio for Strings” and the go-to soundtrack for movies about mothers grieving the deaths of their children.
For those of you who haven’t seen it, a brief synopsis. William Shakespeare marries Agnes Hathaway, with whom he has three children: a girl named Susanna, and a pair of twins named Hamnet and Judith. William moves to London to pursue his career in the theatre, while the rest of the family stays behind in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of eleven, the already sickly Judith contracts a serious infectious disease which she appears sure to succumb to. Armed with her knowledge of herbal medicines, Agnes makes every effort to treat her illness, while William races home from London. Alas, in a tragic reversal, Judith makes a full recovery, but Hamnet contracts her illness, which proves fatal. Agnes and William are devastated by Hamnet’s death, with Agnes harbouring resentment towards William for his absence. Several years later, William channels his bereavement into his masterpiece, the tragedy of Hamlet. Agnes goes to see it being performed in the Globe theatre, with William portraying the ghost of Hamlet’s father and the title role by an actor who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Hamnet. The sight of what her son might have looked like as a young man has an immense effect on Agnes, and she smiles for the first time since his death. It’s an affecting tribute to the power of art to move and to heal.
Emerging from the cinema and wiping tears from our eyes, I remarked to my girlfriend that, as moderns, it’s difficult for us to comprehend the kind of relationship that people in the sixteenth century had with death. For most of human history, mothers dying in childbirth was a routine occurrence. In modern Western countries, a child dying in infancy is exceptionally rare, but in the sixteenth century, raising children was a numbers game. Parents would have eight or nine children, fully cognisant that half of them would not live to see their fifth birthday. Even in the most underdeveloped countries in the modern world, the infant mortality rate is a fraction of what it was in Europe in the seventeenth century or earlier.
A graph of child mortality over time. I struggle to envision a society in which literally half of all children would die before turning five. Note that this chart only dates back to 1751, over a hundred and fifty years after the setting of Hamnet, in which I can only imagine things were even worse.
In light of this, William and Agnes’s reactions to the death of their son are unavoidably anachronistic: they find his death just as shocking and unexpected as any modern married couple would. In the last decade of the sixteenth century, there’s simply no way that two adults of this socioeconomic status could have three children without understanding that at least one of them likely would not live to adulthood. The film even sort of acknowledges this when William’s mother points out to Agnes that three of William’s siblings died before the age of ten.
My mother once explained to me that, with infant mortality being such a horrendous commonplace in earlier eras, parents would deliberately avoid forming strong emotional bonds with their children until such time as they could be reasonably confident the child would survive to adulthood. Such an attitude might strike us as cold and heartless, but that’s only because we’re fortunate enough to live in a time and place in which infant mortality is an extreme rarity. In the sixteenth century, parents had operate under the assumption that one of their children might die young, and prepared accordingly.2 It’s a defensive strategy not unlike the emotional distance doctors are encouraged to maintain with their patients: a doctor who emotionally fell apart every time one of his patients died simply would not be able to do his job effectively.
A clip from Scrubs in which Dr. Cox explains how important this is.
This got me thinking about attachment theory.
This is a concept in psychology first proposed by the psychiatrist John Bowlby. He theorised that children’s early experiences with their parents (or lack thereof, in the case of orphans or those taken into foster care) are formative, and govern how children will tend to form emotional attachments with others in the future. The three canonical “attachment styles” are:
- Securely attached: Securely attached people feel comfortable in platonic and romantic relationships, expect their romantic partner to meet their emotional needs, and are more than happy to meet their romantic partner’s emotional needs.
- Insecurely attached – anxious: Anxiously attached people often suffer from low self-esteem, require regular reassurance that their romantic partners still like them, and tend to act out and engage in “protest behaviour” if they feel their needs aren’t being met. This is the classic “needy” or “clingy” woman who complains that her boyfriend doesn’t pay enough attention to her.
- Insecurely attached – avoidant: Avoidant people are put off by emotional intimacy and use detachment strategies to distance themselves from their friends and romantic partners. They often have unrealistic ideas about love and romance, fantasize about an “ideal” partner with whom they will feel no qualms about becoming intimate with, and idealize past romantic partners as a means of maintaining distance between themselves and their current partner. When women complain about men being “commitment-phobic” or “emotionally unavailable”, this is who they’re complaining about.
Amir Levine and Rachel Heller’s book Attached is a fascinating introduction to the concept. A major limitation is that some of the terms are defined in a rather slippery fashion. Levine and Heller start by assuming, as Bowlby did, that one’s attachment style is largely determined by formative childhood experiences. But elsewhere in the book, they do seem to begrudgingly acknowledge that nurture isn’t the only game in town and that people might be genetically prone to one attachment style over another, and that traits such as sex might influence this. (It isn’t hard to imagine how deliberately keeping one’s sexual partners at an emotional remove might be an evolutionarily beneficial strategy – at least, for the sex which does the impregnating. Genghis Khan certainly didn’t spend much time writing sonnets dedicated to the mothers of his children.) They also recognise that one’s attachment style is not set in stone and that a securely attached person can “rub off” on their insecurely attached partner (or vice versa).
Perhaps attachment style is the wrong term. What I’m really driving at is not so much attachment styles (in the sense of one’s “natural” tendencies for how to act in an intimate relationship) but attachment strategies.
As we saw above, even a naturally friendly and gregarious doctor who thinks fondly of his patients nonetheless knows the importance of maintaining a certain emotional distance from them. If he were to react to a patient’s death in the same way he would if a close friend of his died, he would spend half the year on compassionate leave, rendering him unable to help his surviving patients. Any doctor who doesn’t learn this lesson will eventually be selected out of the talent pool, no longer able to shoulder the emotional burden of coping with the deaths of dozens or hundreds of loved ones. Logically, this implies that emotionally avoidant doctors have a major advantage over their securely attached peers: the latter must learn to suppress their natural predisposition to forming emotional bonds with those around them, while the former do that by default.3
Now think about this concept, not in terms of “survival” in the sense of career progression, but actual, life-or-death survival.
Imagine that you were the parent of several small children, and one of them unexpectedly died before the age of five. In all likelihood, you would be emotionally devastated. You would spend many long hours curled up in bed; your friends and family would likely have to chip in to help caring for your other children; you would probably not work for several months. Such an emotional response would be perfectly appropriate in our modern society, when a small child dying before the age of five is exceptionally rare.
But in a more primitive society like that in which William Shakespeare lived, such a reaction would be completely untenable. The concept of taking compassionate leave to process your grief simply didn’t exist (except for the exceptionally wealthy, who didn’t have to work anyway). Your friends and family likely won’t be in a position to look after your children for you: they’re already working twelve-hour days just to put food on the table for their own children, and two or three additional mouths to feed was no small ask. Like it or not, someone has to till the fields and milk those cows, and that someone will have to be you. A parent who responded to the death of their young child by curling up in bed for months would likely starve.
In light of this, parents had little choice but to maintain an emotional distance with their children, so that they could remain relatively functional if the worst were to befall them. Just as with our doctor example above, this is a situation in which the emotionally avoidant have a competitive advantage: unlike their securely attached peers, avoiding forming emotional bonds with others comes naturally to them. A securely attached parent with a close emotional bond to their young child would likely be so devastated by the loss of that child as to be completely unable to function, thereby selecting themselves out of the gene pool. If attachment styles are innate and subject to genetic predisposition, it’s conceivable that emotional avoidance might even have achieved fixation. When one in four (or even one in two) children die before the age of five, a parent forming emotional bonds with their young children simply isn’t a viable strategy.
In our era, in which infant mortality is rare, the selective pressure on parents to be emotionally avoidant is essentially non-existent, and parents are expected to form strong emotional bonds with their children from a very young age (indeed, the state can even take children into care if their parents are deemed emotionally neglectful: imagine how bizarre that statement would sound to someone in the sixteenth century). Given this, one would logically expect emotionally avoidant behaviour to be rare. After all, there is no society in human history in which the risk of being emotionally devastated by the death of a loved one (including a child) has been lower.
But if anything, the opposite seems to be true. Millennials and Gen Z are having far less sex and far fewer romantic relationships than previous generations. Gen Z are the most sexless generation in human history, with 44% of Gen Z men reporting no dating experience at all during their teen years. Derisive jokes about the “male loneliness crisis” hide the fact that what’s really going on is a human loneliness crisis, with 27% of Gen Z reporting having no close friends at all.
In a society in which death is an omnipresent fact of life, emotionally insulating oneself from those around you is a sound strategy. I truly don’t know what to make of people applying the same strategy in a society in which premature death is practically unheard of.
1Shakespeare’s wife was actually named Anne Hathaway, but the film renames her Agnes to avoid confusion with the actress of the same name (who was herself named after the historical Anne Hathaway).
2This has got me thinking about the concept of psychological trauma, which was traditionally defined as the emotional responses exhibited by people after experiencing distressing events outside the realm of normal human experience (examples including rape, bodily injury, natural disasters etc.). This implies that which events are “traumatic” and which aren’t is a fundamentally statistical matter: an event which might be “outside of the realm of normal human experience” in one society might be common in another. The idea that the death of a minor child would qualify as “traumatic” for a modern married couple, but would not for a married couple in the sixteenth century, sounds a bit weird. But it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense. To a greater or lesser extent, all of our emotional responses are shaped by the culture in which we are raised. It’s reasonable to assume that modern parents would feel more emotionally devastated by the death of their child than would parents who grew up in an environment in which children dying was fairly common.
3As entertaining as it was to read, this was one of many major bugbears I had with Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink. In one chapter, he points out that the single most important factor determining whether a patient files a medical malpractice suit against their doctor is not whether they believe he is medically culpable for poor patient outcomes (or even criminally negligent), but simply how much they like him: as a rule, patients don’t sue people they like. I don’t doubt that this is true: my disagreement with Gladwell is that he seems to think this is a point in support of his thesis (namely, the importance of relying on intuition and snap judgement), when to me it could not be a greater indictment thereof. My goal in going to the hospital is to get better: I’m not here to make friends, and certainly not to make friends with my doctor. A competent doctor who does everything in his power to help his patient should not get sued just because of his substandard bedside manner. Conversely, an idiotic doctor who kills patients by the boatload should not get off scot-free just because of his winning smile. I’ll take Dr. House over Patch Adams any day, thank you.
If you want to map the trajectory of my medical career, you will need a large piece of paper, a pen, and a high tolerance for Brownian motion. It has been tortuous, albeit not quite to the point of varicosity.
Why, for instance, did I spend several months in 2023 working as a GP at a Qatari visa center in India? Mostly because my girlfriend at the time found a job listing that seemed to pay above market rate, and because I needed money for takeout. I am a simple creature, with even simpler needs: I require shelter, internet access, and enough disposable income to ensure a steady influx of complex carbohydrates and the various types of Vitamin B. For all practical purposes, this means biryani.
Why did a foreign branch of the Qatari immigration department require several doctors? Primarily, to process the enormous number of would-be Indian laborers who wished to take up jobs there. I would say they were 99% of the case load - low-skilled laborers working in construction, as domestic servants, as chauffeurs or truck drivers. There were the odd handful of students, or higher-skilled workers, but so few of them that I could still count them on my fingers even after several hundreds of hours of work.
Our job was to perform a quick medical examination and assess fitness for work. Odd chest sounds or a weird cough? Exclude tuberculosis. Weird rashes or bumps? The absolute last thing Qatari urban planners wanted was an outbreak of chickenpox or fungal infections tearing through a high-density labor dormitory. Could the applicant see and hear well enough to avoid being crushed by heavy machinery, or to avoid crushing others when operating heavy machinery? Were they carrying HIV? It was our job to exclude these possibilities before they got there in the first place. Otherwise, the government wasn't particularly picky - a warm body with mostly functional muscles and ligaments would suffice.
This required less cognitive effort than standard GP or Family Medicine. The causal arrow of the doctor-patient interaction was reversed. These people weren’t coming to us because they were sick and seeking healing; they were coming to us because they needed to prove they weren't sick enough to pose a public health hazard or suffer a catastrophic workplace failure.
We were able to provide some actual medical care. It's been several years, so I don't recall with confidence if the applicants were expected to pay for things, or if some or all of the expense was subsidized. But anti-tubercular meds, antifungal ointments and the like weren't that expensive. Worst case, if we identified something like a hernia, the poorest patients could still report to a government hospital for free treatment.
A rejection on medical grounds wasn't necessarily final. Plenty of applicants returned, after having sought treatment for whatever disqualified them the first time. It wasn't held against them.
While the workload was immense (there were a lot of patients to see, and not much time to see them given our quotas), I did regularly have the opportunity to chat with my patients when work was slow or while I was working on simple documentation. Some of that documentation included the kind of work they intended to do (we'd care more about poor vision for a person who had sought a job as a driver than we would for a sanitation worker), and I was initially quite curious about why they felt the need to become a migrant worker in the first place.
Then there was the fact that public perception in the West had soured on Qatari labor practices in the wake of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Enormous numbers of migrant workers had been brought in to help build stadiums and infrastructure, and many had died.
Exact and reliable numbers are hard to find. The true number of deaths remains deeply contested. The Guardian reported that at least 6,500 South Asian migrant workers died in Qatar since the country was awarded the World Cup in 2010 - many were low-wage migrant workers, and a substantial share worked in construction and other physically demanding sectors exposed to extreme heat. However, this figure is disputed. Critics noted that the 6,500 figure refers to all deaths of migrant workers from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, India, and Bangladesh regardless of cause, and that not all of those deaths were work-related or tied to World Cup projects.
Qatar's official position was far lower. Qatari authorities maintained there were three work-related deaths and 37 non-work-related deaths on World Cup-related projects within the Supreme Committee's scope. But in a striking on-camera admission, Hassan al-Thawadi, secretary general of Qatar's Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, told a TV interviewer that there had been "between 400 and 500" migrant worker deaths connected to World Cup preparations over the preceding 12 years. His committee later walked the comment back, claiming it referred to nationwide work-related fatalities across all sectors. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both called even the 400-500 figure a vast undercount.
It is worth pausing here, because the statistics are genuinely confusing in ways that I think matter. The 6,500 figure, as several researchers have noted, covers all-cause mortality for a very large working-age male population over twelve years - a group that would have a non-trivial background death rate even if they stayed home and did nothing dangerous. Some analyses, including ILO-linked work on Nepali migrants, have argued that overall mortality was not obviously higher than among comparable same-age Nepali men, though other research found marked heat-linked cardiovascular mortality among Nepali workers in Qatar. The Nepal report also (correctly) notes that the migrants go through medical screening, and are mostly young men in better health on average. They try to adjust for this, at least for age.
I raise this not to minimize the deaths - dying of heat exhaustion in a foreign country, far from your family, in service of a football tournament, is a genuine tragedy regardless of the comparison group - but because I think precision matters. "Qatar killed 6,500 workers" and "Qatar had elevated occupational mortality in difficult-to-quantify ways" are meaningfully different claims, and conflating them makes it harder to know what we should actually want to change.
I am unsure if there was increased scrutiny on the health of incoming workers to avoid future deaths, or if the work I was doing was already standard. I do not recall any formal or informal pressure from my employers to turn a blind eye to disqualifying conditions - that came from the workers themselves. I will get to that.
I already felt some degree of innate sympathy for the applicants. Were we really that different, them and I?
At that exact moment in my life, I was furiously studying for the exams that would allow me to move to the UK and work in the NHS. We were both engaged in geographic arbitrage. We were both looking at the map of the global economy, identifying zones of massive capital accumulation, and jumping through burning bureaucratic hoops to transport our human capital there to capture the wage premium. Nobody really calls an Indian doctor moving to the UK a "migrant worker," but that is exactly what I am right now. The difference between me and the guy applying to drive forklifts in Doha is quantitative, not qualitative.
I could well understand the reasons why someone might leave their friends and family behind, go to a distant land across an ocean and then work long hours in suboptimal conditions, but I wanted to hear that for myself.
As I expected, the main reason was the incredibly attractive pay. If I'm being honest, the main reason I moved to the UK was the money too. "Incredibly attractive?" I imagine you thinking, perhaps recalling that by First World standards their salary was grossly lacking. To the point of regular accusation that the Qataris and other Middle Eastern petrostates are exploitative, preying on their workers.
First World standards are not Third World standards.
This is where Western intuition about labor often misfires, stumbling into a sort of well-intentioned but suffocating paternalism. The argument generally goes: This job involves intense heat, long hours, and low pay relative to Western minimum wages. Therefore, it is inherently exploitative, and anyone taking it must be a victim of coercion or deception.
This completely ignores the economic principle of revealed preferences: the idea that you can tell what a person actually values by observing what they choose to do under constraint. Western pundits sit in climate-controlled pods and declare that nobody should ever have to work in forty-degree heat for $300 a month. But for someone whose alternative is working in forty-degree heat in Bihar for $30 a month with no social safety net, banning Qatari labor practices doesn't save them. It just destroys their highest expected-value option.
You cannot legislate away grinding poverty and resource constraints.
The economic case for Gulf migration from South Asia is almost embarrassingly strong when you actually look at it. India received roughly $120 billion in remittances in 2023, making it the world's largest recipient, with Gulf states still accounting for a very large share, though the RBI's own survey data show that advanced economies now contribute more than half of India's remittances. For certain origin states - Kerala being the clearest case, alongside Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu - remittance income is not a rounding error in household economics; it is the household economy. The man sending money home from Doha is participating in a system that has done more for South Asian poverty alleviation than most bilateral aid programs combined. This is not a defense of every condition under which that labor is extracted. It is simply a fact that seems consistently underweighted in Western discourse.
Consider the following gentleman: he had shown up seeking to clear the medical examination so that he could carry sacks of concrete under the sweltering heat of a desert sun. Out of curiosity, I asked him why he hadn't looked for work around his place of birth.
He looked at me, quite forlorn, and explained that there was no work to be had there. He hailed from a small village, had no particular educational qualifications, and the kinds of odd jobs and day labor he had once done had dried up long ago. I noted that he had already traveled a distance equivalent to half the breadth of Europe to even show up here on the other end of India in the first place, and can only trust his judgment that he would not have done this without good reason.
Another man comes to mind (it is not a coincidence that the majority of applicants were men). He was a would-be returnee - he had completed a several year tour of duty in Qatar itself, for as long as his visa allowed, and then returned because he was forced to, immediately seeking reassessment so he could head right back. He had worked as a truck driver, and now wanted to become a personal chauffeur instead.
He had been away for several years and had not returned a moment before he was compelled to. He had family: a wife and a young son, as well as elderly parents. All of them relied on him as their primary breadwinner. I asked him if he missed them. Of course he did. But love would not put food on the table. Love would not put his son into a decent school and ensure that he picked up the educational qualifications that would break the cycle. Love would not ensure his elderly and increasingly frail parents would get beyond-basic medical care and not have to till marginal soil at the tiny plot of land they farmed.
But the labor he did out of love and duty would. He told me that he videocalled them every night, and showed me that he kept a picture of his family on his phone. He had a physical copy close at hand, tucked behind the transparent case. It was bleached by the sun to the point of illegibility and half-covered by what I think was a small-denomination Riyal note.
He said this all in an incredibly matter-of-fact way. I felt my eyes tear up, and I looked away so he wouldn't notice. My eyes are already tearing up as I write this passage, the memories no less vivid for the passage of many years. Now, you are at the point where my screen is blurry because of the moisture. Fortunately, I am a digital native, and I can touch-type on a touchscreen reasonably well with my eyes closed nonetheless. Autocorrect and a future editing pass will fix any errors.
(Yes, I do almost all my writing on a phone. I prefer it that way.)
There. Now they're drying up, and I'm slightly embarrassed for being maudlin. I am rarely given to sentiment, and I hope you will forgive me for this momentary lapse.
I asked him how well the job paid. Well enough to be worth it, he told me. He quoted a figure that was not very far from my then monthly salary of INR 76,000 (about $820 today). Whatever he made there, I noted that I had made about the same while working as an actual doctor in India in earlier jobs (as I've said, this gig paid well, better than previous jobs I'd had and many I had later).
He expected a decent bump - personal drivers seemed to be paid slightly better than commercial operators. I do not know if he was being hired by a well-off individual directly or through an agency. Probably the latter, if I had to guess, less hassle that way.
I asked him if he had ever worked similar roles in India. He said he had. He had made a tenth the money, in conditions far worse than what he would face in Qatar. He, like many other people I interviewed, viewed the life you have the luxury of considering inhumane and unpalatable, and deemed it a strict improvement to the status quo. He was eager to be back. He was saddened that his son would continue growing up in his absence, but he was optimistic that the boy would understand why his father did what he had to do.
One of the reasons this struck me so hard then, as it continues to do now, is that my own father had done much the same. I will beat myself with a rusty stick before I claim he was an absentee dad, but he was busy, only able to give his kids less time than he would have liked because he was busy working himself ragged to ensure our material prosperity. I love him, and hope this man's son - now probably in middle school - will also understand. I do not have to go back more than a single generation before hitting ancestors who were also rural peasants, albeit with more and better land than could be found in an impoverished corner of Bihar.
By moving to the Middle East, he was engaged in arbitrage that allowed him to make a salary comparable to the doctor seeing him in India. I look at how much more I make after working in the NHS and see a similar bump.
I just have the luxury of capturing my wage premium inside a climate-controlled hospital, sleeping in a comfortable bed, and making enough money to fly home on holidays. I try to be grateful for the privilege. I try to give the hedonic treadmill a good kick when it has the temerity to make me feel too bad for myself.
There are many other reasons that people decry the Kafala system other than the perceived poor pay and working conditions. The illegal seizure of passports, employer permission required to switch jobs, accusations of physical abuse and violence are all well-documented, though the link to the 2020 Reuters article claims the system was overhauled and “effectively dismantled”.
I make no firm claims on actual frequency; I have seen nothing with my own two eyes. Nor do I want to exonerate the Qatari government from all accusation. What I will say is that "exploitation" is a word with a definition, and that definition requires something more than "a transaction that takes place under conditions of inequality." If we define exploitation as taking unfair advantage of vulnerability, we need a story about how the worker is made worse off relative to the alternative - and the workers I spoke with, consistently and across months, told me the opposite story. They are not passive victims of false consciousness. They are adults making difficult tradeoffs under difficult constraints, the same tradeoffs that educated Westerners make constantly but with much less margin for error and no safety net.
The people who know best still queued up for hours in the hopes of returning, and I am willing to respect them as rational actors following their incentives. I will not dictate to them what labor conditions they are allowed to consider acceptable while sitting on a comfy armchair.
I do not recall ever outright rejecting an applicant for a cause that couldn't be fixed, but even the occasional instances where I had to turn them away and ask them to come back after treatment hurt. Both of us - there was often bargaining and disappointment that cut me to the bone. I do not enjoy making people sad, even if my job occasionally demands that of me. I regret making them spend even more of their very limited money and time on followups and significant travel expenses, even if I was duty-bound to do so on occasion. We quit that job soon; you might find it ironic that we did so because of poor working conditions and not moral indignation or bad pay. I do, though said irony only strikes me now, in retrospect.
Returning to the man I spoke about, I found nothing of concern, and I would have been willing to look the other way for anything that did not threaten to end his life or immediately terminate his employment. I stamped the necessary seals on his digital application form, accepted his profuse thanks, and wished him well. I meant it. I continue meaning it.
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