The Santa Fe New Mexican from Santa Fe, New Mexico • 87

Sunday December 5 1999 THE NEW MEXICAN 1-23 Herb societies honor rosemary for year 2000 By KATHY VAN MULLEKOM Daily Press (Newport News Va) An old factory building on Main Street in Manayunk Pa now refurbished Is home to a has done likewise in neighborhoods in other cities Banana Republic store Federal Realty invested heavily in the street's redevelopment am Bringing life back to the Older suburbs often suffer from inner-city woes Rosemary the Christmas herb honored for love and remembrance greets the millennium as I-Ierb of the Year 2000 an honor bestowed by the herb-growing industry and groups such as the Herb Society of America and the International Herb Society A member of the Labiatae or mint family rosemary is known in botanical terms as Rosmarinus officinalis In Greek its name means of the for the dew-like appearance of the inconspicuous pale violet-blue flowers from a distance The foliage is striking going from green to gray-green The evergreen shrub is native to the dry coastal areas of the Mediterranean Gardeners love rosemary indoors and outdoors often shaping it into small topiaries that look fashionably smart in decorative pots Use them on the mantel in the center of the table or grouped along a windowsill for holiday and year-round decorating Rosemary is very finicky about watering says Colonial Williamsburg research assistant Larry Griffith Here are directions for making your own rosemary standard: Select a rosemary plant that has a strong straight central leader or stem This stem should proceed directly out of the crown and should bear no signs of having been nipped or pruned at any time A rosemary plant at least 8 to 10 inches tall in a 4-inch pot works best This transplants better than a rosemary potted in a larger size If you wish to transplant your developing standard choose an appropriate container that offers very good drainage The key to successful rosemary is perfect drainage A dry rocky alkaline soil is best If using commercial potting soil a healthy dose of grit or course sand will help with proper drainage Once repotted select the straightest stem coming directly out of the crown If the terminal bud (borne at the ip a stem or shoot) has been removed 'your standard will be rrooKed-K-'vl'o6 Select a bamboo stick Up to 38 inches in diameter to serve as the support for the standard Cut 10 8-inch pieces of tape to have on hand when you begin to train the standard to the support Use pruning shears to rerhove all other stems emerging outof the crown Very often rosemary will only have one shoot in which case begin to remove lateral growth from around the bottom of the primary selected stem Slide the bamboo support down through the rosemary plant and insert in into the soil as close as possible to the primary stem Thke care not to damage the major roots that might diverge from around the crown It might take a couple of attempts before a place can be found to insert the support Insert the support until the base of the pot is felt Twist a piece of the pre-cut florist tape around the bamboo support and twist the ends so that the bamboo stake is holding the florist tape snuggly and the florist two ends are free in the air Starting from the bottom bring the rosemary stem so that it is parallel with the bamboo stake Bring the two free ends of the florist tape around each side of the stem and twist them together taking care not to make too snug a fit The rosemary stem will swell as it grows In any case you should check the fit of the tape every month to ensure that you are not girdling the stem What you will have achieved is a figure-8 so that the circle of the tape around the stem is independent of the circle of tape around the bamboo support Moving up the stem secure the stem in an additional two places moving up to within half the height of the standard removing lateral shoots as you proceed Leave sufficient growth at the top of the rosemary to ensure vigorous growth The ball of the standard will form over time It is important to leave enough growth at the top of the standard to ensure that there is adequate leaf surface to wick water up from the roots and prevent moist feet and possible rot Under no circumstances prune the terminal leader bud until the plant has reached the height you But than enough money in a core community such as ours to provide a she said our markel show it We had to create the market" In a way what Federal Realty Investment Ibust ended up doing when it began buying up vacant properties in Manayunk in the late 1980s While the residential portion of the neighborhood was and is completely viable business district along Main Street was filled with decaying vacant properties that seemed to cry out for new said Maureen McAvey an official with Federal Realty of Rockville Md Realizing that a declining business district put the neighborhood at risk and seeing an opportunity for a good investment Federal Realty invested in 23 prop erties along Main Street and redeveloped them for a mix of local and national tenants she said The result: Downtown Manayunk the center of a 19th-century mill neighborhood began attracting shoppers diners and more development including multifamily dwellings The success encouraged Federal Realty to become involved in a variety of similar projects throughout the country on a much larger scale five blocks of downtown Bethesda Md an area near the Alamo in San Antonio Texas and areas in Arlington Va and San Jose Calif The problems being faced by first-ring suburbs are the result of a series of major shifts in American housing policy made after 1945 according to Donald Carter a managing principal in Urban Design Associates of Pittsburgh construction availability of mortgages and inept planning fueled the great move Carter said result over time was what seeing today: growing poverty lack of community and racial And those problems may not be just limited to the first ring features of these postwar suburbs automobile dependency lower density housing segregated land use and the lack of a town center are the same problems that exist in the 1990s Carter said time may be only a generation away when housing values will sag and commercial shopping strips will What Carter finds most annoying is that Americans knew how to build these suburbs better than they ended up doing as if postwar planners had a collective stroke and lost all memory of what used to work" he said model should have been Boston and Philadel- phia 200-year-old model traditional neighborhoods in which streets are public ground where all people can While the support has to be local the engine for revitalizing these first-ring suburbs has to be regional Rawson said Much of what Shaker Heights has accomplished was the result of incentives and investment plans approved by the state legislature for Cleveland and surrounding counties And even when both the incentives and the support are there convincing developers that such projects are viable and financially sound requires the patience of Job and a marketing effort worthy of PT Barnum been the experience of Harriet Saperstein whose not-for-profit group HP Devco has been trying to jump-start first suburb Highland Park Mich The birthplace of mass production Highland Park was home to Chrysler and Ford with a population of 60000 in 1960 The car plants are gone and today Highland Park with a population of 20000 is one of two of most-distressed cities 1992 Sears left Chrysler left the hospital merged and we had a serial killer who was caught of Saperstein said has been so much disinvestment over the last 20 years that finding it difficult to catch Saperstein said we find ourselves in need of a grant we talk about how bad Highland Park is and if we want to attract retailers we tell them how good Highland Park Both methods are proving successful About $6 million in federal grant money channeled through the state has attracted $56 million from private investors including Chrysler to develop Highland Park Town Center a mix of stores offices and residences on the site of a trolley terminal in the middle of downtown Center Plaza is visceral and Saperstein said can see it and feel it and it is All the developers are earning a reasonable profit Saperstein said and sales are putting the stores in the top five or six in the region The only problem is with trash and loitering The stores have created 400 new jobs which means more money to spend in the store of the stores are chains" she said are no mom-and-pops And while there are a lot of drugstores the community really wants a sit-down restaurant and a hardware store but we talk anyone into that Saperstein said recent statistics show that the inner cities is resulting in a huge loss of potential retail sales that the people living in these areas can provide The reason for the hesitation by retailers is historical fears pf nonwhite demographic Saperstein said decided that people who spend money feel more comfortable doing it in areas that are 80-20 percent white than in areas that are 80-20 percent black To avoid the issue of why they build in black areas they say that most black shoppers would rather go to white areas" By ALAN HEAVENS The Philadelphia Inquirer PHILADELPHIA Although the people who live there might not appreciate the comparison suburbs those conipunitiesjust outside the city jirtiits pr een suburbanlike neighborhoods inside the boundary are suffering many of the problems found in the inner city been so focused on the inner city that not begun noticing many of the same signs of disinvestment in these older suburban David Goss senior director of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association told a group of developers and planners at a recent meeting of the Urban Land Institute in Washington housing stock is getting older commercial areas are unable to compete with newer regional malls farther out from the center and jobs are moving Goss said new urbanism has only focused on communities with defined neighborhoods But a lot of these first-ring suburbs are fighting back developing innovative programs for revitalization and developing public-private partnerships to achieve First-ring suburbs are technically defined as communities that sprang up during the building boom after World War II as symbols of a new and prosperous America Some were brand-new such as the Levittowns of New York Pennsylvania and New Jersey Many were existing communities transformed by phenomenal postwar growth such as Bristol Cherry Hill and Ridley Park Still others were undeveloped sections of cities such as Northeast Philadelphia and northwest Washington And a few were older stable blue-collar neighborhoods such as Manayunk and Roxbor-ough that were affordable and semi-suburban Shaker Heights Ohio is an example of an older first-ring suburb that benefited from the postwar boom The population of the Cleveland suburb a planned community dating from 1920 ranges the wealthiest CEOs to 50 percent of the residents who earn less than $50000 a according to Judy Rawson a councilwoman who was elected the mayor Nov 2 are a national model of stable diversity with a population 34 percent African American and a school system 52 percent black and is the No 1 public system in she said "However financing such an educational system requires a large tax base and ours has been eroding To compen- sate we have to raise taxes and that tends to drive people out of Shaker Heights to suburbs farther from What Shaker Heights has learned is that people even when they realize there is a problem like having a solution shoved down their throats uncertainty about how residents will react to sqch proposals forces the politicians into inactivity" Rawson said what you find when you bother to Nineteenth-century buildings on Main Street in Manayunk Pa have attracted tenants such as The Bucks County Coffee Co ask them is that longtime residents remain in these first-ring suburbs because they like the diversity the neighborhoods and convenient transit and most importantly they will be supportive if you guarantee that their values will be Rawson said that preserving these older neighborhoods a values issue that the residents feel deeply but often find it difficult to For example they want beauty but what they consider beauty is much more than just a berm separating the Kmart and the Wal-Mart They want Rawson said often this bumps up against ideas that are designed to make the neighborhoods more livable such as filling in vacant lots between two houses with more Even in neighborhoods where deterioration is evident a substantial number of people fear change even if it is for the better she said tried to convert an old school into luxury lofts for empty nesters and it was turned down Rawson said explain the project and how it would affect the neighborhood and pie just began to expect the worst Even words enough You have to show them pictures you need to let them see what you are doing public sector has to convince the public that change whatever it involves is for the best and that the change is high Rawson said The lesson was learned Residents reacted much more positively when redevelopment group came up with a proposal to change the area around a stark transit depot by building traditional-looking multifamily housing and retail shops on bottfteides.