youwelcome I'm already goldenson in forBrian lair tonight drone warfare thehuman toll and you think today's dronesinsulate us from killing wait till youhear about tomorrow's also on theprogram mental illness is the bipolarcharacter carry on homeland just onesign that the stigma against mentallyill is lifting Plus beautifying thecity's architects here in New York dreamup a way to put the park back in ParkAvenue and a kid from st. Louistransforms distasteful dumpsters into amobile feast of art first drones thedominant narrative about the use ofdrones in Pakistan Afghanistan Yemen andelsewhere is this they are surgicallyprecise and eliminate terrorists withoutmuch collateral damage but a recentnine-month study by Stanford Universityand NYU covering eight years of droneuse in Pakistan reports this is simplynot true with this in mind right nowlet's meet our guests independentjournalists madeeha died here believesthat the press coverage around droneshas been diverted to the issues oflegality and secrecy instead of moralityshe has reported extensively fromPakistan talked with drone survivors andhis co-editor of the new essaycollection dispatches from PakistanSpencer Ackerman is concerned about thenext generation of drone warfare asenior writer at Wired he writes theDanger Room blog on national security atwired.com he recently penned a storywith this title paraphrasing thePentagon a human will always decide whena robot kills you Spencer joins us viaSkype from Washington DC so welcomethanks for coming in so I've sort ofsummarized how many Americans viewdrones also I might add as a way to asafe way to go on the attack withoutrisking American troopshow's that Howard drone strikes viewedin Pakistan well in Pakistan you havethe mass of the population is againstthem no question you know drone attackshappened along the borders of Pakistanin an area that has been closed off forquite some time now so you know they'repolitically and geographically on themargins of Pakistan Pakistan ease youknow there's a hundred and eightymillion people in that country have verymany things to worry about electricitywater shortages etc that take up youknow their daily lives but to the extentthat they are aware and they are awareof drone attacks happening on theborders in Pakistan they're very muchagainst them and you know the only placewhere you might find a pro drone opinionis within the english-language presswhich is a small minority in Pakistanare the drone strikes frequent enoughthat people live under a constant fearof them absolutely i mean under theobama administration they have beenobama's drone attack to pakistan sixtimes as many times as bush soabsolutely they are they happen all thetime but not just the strike itselfdrones hover in the area 24-7 and youknow as you've heard in in the locallanguage they're called you know bangGhana which sound which is the buzzingthe buzzing of abby and they can hearthem all the time and when I've spokento drone strike victims they speak to meabout drones hovering overhead theconstant buzzing the uncertainty ofknowing when they're actually going tostrike so sometimes they're justphotographing doing reconnaissance othertimes they're on the warpath exactlythanks i see hmmm let me turn to Spencerfor a minute and ask you about the nextgeneration of drones and some otherquestions beginning with where are thesedrones Spencer and from yourunderstanding where they operated fromwho's working this joystick who'spiloting this on the ground you haveessentially two different drug programsone run by the CIA one run by the USmilitary the one run by the militaryoperates from a great degree from a fewbaseswestern United States the southwesternof the United States as well as sort ofexpeditionary will be pads you mightcall them in Afghanistan in places sortof around the Middle East as well asincreasingly in in Africa the CIA is alot more secretive right and there andin terms of targeting this where thesedecisions made wait I need by that wellthere has to be the decision at allalong the way should we should we fireshould we not fire we've got thisreconnaissance there where along thatwe're in the chain of command does thishappen how high up for the seat for theCIA's program there's something of aninstitutional bureaucratic apparatus runlargely by John Brennan the president'schief counterterrorism advisor andthere's a list of sort of high-valuetargets for the drone program thatsupposedly Obama itself personallyproves for the the adjunct you mightfall out of the drone war in Afghanistanwhich is increasingly most of the of theair combat war in that war that's that'sdone throughout the military chain ofcommand no but do let me ask you thethere's a lot of debate about thelegality of using drones which I think apart has to do with the fact that thewar isn't declared and also thatPakistan for example is not a countrywe're at war with it's not even likeAfghanistan and the distinction is madebetween the with the DoD does theDepartment of Defense and the CIA what'sthat distinction and are we too hung upon it I think absolutely Americans arevery much hung up on the wrong set ofquestions you know the military humanrights organizations will have beendemanding for instance that in the caseof Pakistan where the drone program isrun by the CIA that that drone programbe handed over them to the military theassumption is that the military will bemore transparent but that's reallyquestionable that's a questionableassumptionyou know secondly this this there's beenbecome an obsession with thetransparency and accountability rhetoricthat is you know very much present innot just among lawyers but in theprogressive discourse here in the UnitedStates more generally the trouble withthat is that when I speak to people inPakistan in the tribal areas or subjectto drones they're not talking abouttransparency and accountability theseare very slow procedures that may takeyears to figure out you know in themeantime people are dying and thesepeople they want to stop going tofunerals that's what they're telling methey want to stop dying they want thekilling to stop transparency andaccountability are not things thatthey're really concerned about these areissues that the American public needs toworry about in relation to itsgovernment but these are not issues thatreally affect the lives at hand whichare those of the Pakistanis in thetribal areas right well we'll look atsome pictures that you brought us ofthese people so we can meet them andhear their stories in a minute but Ijust want to ask Spencer about whetheryou know this distinction between theDoD and and the CIA is going to becomemoot soon because of a technologicaldevelopment our drones going to get evenmore automated is it face recognitionwhat's what's coming in the future acouple different things what is rightnow with a remotely piloted vehicle ordrone fire as a weapon a human beingdecides to do that increasingly in thefuture why autonomy may not advance tothe point where a human is outside ofthe chain of decision making some of thedesign techniques coming on with droneswill sort of get you a little bit closerto that reality of the new models thatare that are coming out particularly forsmaller drones make the drone sort ofits own missile going on a suicidemission you might say there's there'sone example called the Switchblade whichis in Afghanistan right now that'sbasically avery small automated missile that can befired by a soldier carrying it in hisbackpack and uses GPS controls to steerto a target that's not quite autonomybut we're still sort of closer than weare now to the reality of a sort of selffiring weapon we probably won't ever getto a self ir 11 before we meet some ofthese survivors why do you make adistinction between the use of dronesand let's say you know dropping a bombon north vietnam from 50,000 feet whereyou don't see your target either and insome ways that kind of carpet bombingyou could argue is far worse not eventargeted why is why is there this sensethat it's immoral because the pilot isnot there in an airplane well I thinkyou know the tribal areas in Pakistanare subject to three forms of violenceone is the drone attacks by theAmericans and other is the Pakistanimilitary and the third are criminalgangs like the TTP and I don't think thedrones are necessarily you know moreimmoral than these other forms ofviolence the issue with the drones isthat because they are they appear welllet me restate that the issue with thedrones is that they appear to be aprecise form of killing and so we havethese distinctions between civilians andmilitants and the assumption is thathumans make mistakes that drones do notnow that's simply not the case at theend of the day there is a person that ismaking decisions with the drones and youknow they're making decisions about whatyou know who is a civilian and who is amilitant now we know with drones in factin actuality in Afghanistan for exampleyou know they've even wrongly shotAmerican soldiers by mistake becausethey couldn't tell the differencethey've shot animals because theycouldn't tell the difference between ahuman and and and an animal right so thepublic relations is that this is aprecise only bad guys die rightabsolutely well this is I think themoment to look at some pictures of thatyouwith us let's look up your who is thisthis is Emma John and he's leaningforward like that because he's lost hishearing in a drone attack that tookplace on March seventeenth 2011 it wasthe largest number of people killed in asingle drone strike in Pakistan therewas a Jirga gathering of tribal eldersthat was taking place and you know 40 to50 people were killed in that in thatstrike we don't have the exact number hewas there and he was injured and he losthis hearing as well as injuries to hislegs I see let me see another picturebecause it gives us a sense and makethis makes it real who's this this isfahim Kureishi he's a teenager and youknow he's in his yeah he's about 16 17years old now he's showing me his glasseye there he's one of the kids who wasinjured during one of the first strikesthat happened on the first day thatobama took office in january 2009 rightnext one i think it takes a littlesecond there we go this is karim hon andhe lost his son a teenage son and abrother who was a poet and a master's inEnglish and a teacher as well as a houseguest on New Year's Eve in December 2009he is the person who launched one of thefirst cases against the CIA in Pakistanoh he's the lawyer who's done this whywas gonna ask you but well let's take aminute and do that was asked about thatwhich is on what basis are they bringingthis legal case in Pakistan against whoawho's the plaintiff I me was the wellthey named a number of people as CIA'sstation chief at the time Jonathan banksoh right was was one of them and theirclaim as far as I understand it fromshahzad upper who's the lawyer who'sbeen leading these cases is that withthe CIA conducting these drone strikesand CI is a civilian organizationand so any drone strikes or any killingthat they come it is actually an act ofhomicide I see well that's that it's notlikely to go anywhere is it that case umI it's been in the courts and they aregetting results they're hoping thatthey'll be able to you know get thePakistani government to divulge what itknows about drone strikes in Pakistanand then also to highlight the issue aswell yes yes there this is such anenormous issue it's hard to know exactlyhow to narrow but I could imagine peoplewatching this thinking what were thesepeople doing in these compounds thatthey were targeted I mean maybe a fewcivilians were killed but these peoplemaybe had no business there what's thelarger story behind we'd have time tolook at all the pictures you brought butwhat's what's the larger story do wecall any home that we hit by mistake acompound or I mean how accurate is thisfirst of all these aren't compoundstheir homes they just don't look like anAmerican home so they are calledcompounds in the American press buttheir homes fine what about this otherword militant we always hear that we'dkilled 17 militants what's that mean inyour I mean I think the best way tounderstand it is I think to some extentwhat happens in Harlem is what happensin Pakistan which is that you know inhere in the United States you haveTrayvon Martin you have Sean Bell youknow shot before a day before hiswedding the same kind of thing isexactly what is happening in inbox inthe sense that there's in the sense thatthat there is a sense of suspicion youknow as a consequence of a certainracial racialized outlook right and andpeople are being killed on the basis ofon the basis of suspicion now whathappens in the United States is thatwhen things like you know when whensituations like Trayvon Martin or SeanBell arise we don't say well they'veonly killed point zero two percent ofthe you know african-american populationso therefore it's morally okay but theseare precisely the arguments that areactually being made in the context ofPakistan where people like Scott Shanein the New York Times and elsewhereother people are making the argumentthatyou know we're only killing X percentageof civilians and therefore it's okay andinstrumentally useful to continue to usedrones but statistics are really aterrible way to adjudicate moral art youknow moral questions and ethicalquestions right yes and I wish we hadmore time to talk I wanted to ask afinal question with Spencer Spencer isthere any possibility that thetechnology will improve it in a positiveway where one could actually kill only aperson who was a terrorist and wasplanning to you know do the next WorldTrade Center or his technology not theanswer I that's not fundamentally aquestion you can address you know solelythrough technology the idea is supposedto be that a drone strike is is at theend of the cycle of intelligencecuration where you know a fair amountabout the person that you are actuallytargeting including you know thatperson's name there you know pattern oflife habits activities and so forthamong the things that the CIA is allowedto do under Obama is conduct somethingcalled a signature strike which is thepresumption that a male between the agesof I don't know 18 to 49 or somethingconsidered a military-age male living inone of these areas you know perhaps Iguess what the American press as yourother guests just mentioned calls acompound is presumptively a militant andthat is not the sort of thing that thattechnology can resolve as a humandecision thank you for your time andyour thoughts both of you I wish we hadmore time but unfortunately this issueis going to stay with us so we'll beback again thanks again thank you nextup mental illness is the bipolarcharacter like Laurie on like carry onHomeland a sign that the stigma islifting perhaps the strongest and mostintriguing character on television todayis a post-911 female CIA operative whohunts terrorists and who is alsomentally ill sounds implausible butactress clearedmaine's is convincing and delivers themost realistic and human portrayal ofmental illness of anyone on TV to dateat least according to many viewers Iknow who are in a position to know andthat's got us to thinking have we begunto turn the corner when it comes tostigmatizing mental illness joining usvia Skype dr. Bernice pesky ladilla youhave to pronounce this right for meprofessor forgive me okay hi Marty howare you hi and give us the rightpronunciation so I don't make thismistake again it's pesce salido butBernice is just fine okay Bernice that'sa lot easier yeah you are just thedistinguished professor of sociology atIndiana University also chair of theAdvisory Council for a new nonprofitbring change to mind which actress GlennClose co-founded to help end the stigmaaround mental illness here in the studiotwo guests Denise David parent advocatefrom the New York City chapter of theNational Alliance on Mental Illness andKatie Lazarus who I hope welcomes aredescribing her as a clinical psychdoctorate dropout turned writer yourparents know this already right aboutyou I'm not like outing you right am Ithey do now well they're right beforethe holidays yes and that's going I hopeyou don't pay to two enormous a price umlet's let's start out in Indiana tell usabout this unique study you did whatwhat did you learn about and tell someof the key findings about this I don'tknow if you call it prejudice againstthe mentally ill but certainly stigmawell one of the things that we werecurious about was whether or not theAmerican culture had changed and westarted looking around and what kind ofresearch there had been and there hadn'treally been a national study for almost40 years in the US so we decided it wastime and we found some very interestingthings we found that Americans havetotally understood the idea of thecauses of mental illness located in thebrain thinking about issues of chemicaland balance and rejecting of ideas ofbad bad parenting so that was all thegood news and we were verypleased about that but then we also sawthat there just wasn't very much changein how they thought about acceptingpeople with mental health problems orwhether or not they thought they weredangerous in fact we found that therewas a significant increase in the numberof people who spontaneously mentionedthat people with mental illness werelikely to be dangerous yeah how do youexplain it well it seemed to us that oneof the things that had happened is thatthe the language of dangerous to self orothers had been put forward by mentalhealth advocates as a protection forpeople met with mental illness but itseems to have seeped down into popularculture as a way to think about anddescribe people with mental illness Ithink the other thing is that Americansreally don't know how to understandviolence and so I think is a way ofunderstanding and distancing itdistancing themselves from it they sortof think about well it must be thatthere's something wrong with that personbut the research is quite clear thatthat's really just not the case withregard to people with mental illness butthat's what we found in our study I seeI see now when you hear that descriptiondoes it ring a bell in terms of yourbringing up your own child in terms ofthe fear or the two kinds of fear reallythe fear of violence but also just thefear of identifying with mentally illpeople yes well coming from a Caribbeanculture background myself I remember mydaughter when she was diagnosed withbipolar disorder she's 21 now thesociety finally blames me for herillness blames me for her behavior andthis is the way we were raised growingup in the culture if the child isdisobedient if the child is ruler if thechild is just simply angry or frustratedit's up to us as family as parents todiscipline that chill that shot rightnow where did you hear that from fromteachers principals doctors doctorsteachers principals her psychiatristtold me once that there's somethingwrong with this child and I need tofigure out what it is because they needto send somebody in the home to figureout what's going on at home because thischild just is just a rule child and I asher parent need to figure out what'sgoing on with her and I need todiscipline herfamily said the same thing you know I'veheard it all from friends family membersof the community that this child is justpossess and and there's something wrongwith her and as our parent I need tofigure out what that is this didn't feelright to you so you got on Google rightyeah would you do tell me I went onGoogle era when she was diagnosed thefirst time her condition brought her outand said your daughter has bipolar takeher home give her these meds now Ididn't know what bipolar was I don'tknow what was going on with his childAlan knew i had an angry child who oneminute was happy next many was so angryat a minute was so frustrating was sodepressed couldn't get out of her roomso i went on google and i try to figureout support groups and i try to figureout what bipolar was so i put in theworld by Poland that's when I came upwith the information from Nami which isNational Alliance on Mental Illness andI saw these services and all thesesupport groups for parents and familieslike myself and that's what i call theNami helpline and they started giving meall these resource and support andeducation when you hear these this storywhat's it do you identify what does itmake you think uh no i mean i think thatin some ways your child's very lucky toget this diagnosis at a young age I meanto me hearing about mental illness itusually comes out when people are oldereither as a teenager or when they're anadult so there's something I think luckythat she's getting all these supportsnow even if it's a pain for you it'sexhausting for you and something you'drather not deal with it it's alsofortunate for her can you think too manypeople talk about mental illness thatit's that maybe my trying to celebratethe fact that it's coming out of thecloset is it is not right or how do youthink about it I mean I item I don'tthink you should ever stop talking Imean I dog though I've been in apersonal way you know it's revealing itto work or with your friends or it's apen facebook you know right no totallydepends if i go into my dentist's officeand my dentist tells me that he haspanic attacks and sometimes he gets alittle shaky mm-hmm I'm not sure I wantto hear that like right before he'sgonna I mean that's not the time that Iwant to know about that or the milk Iwanna hear from Iit's like getting a root canal its ownmetaphor that's enough of traumaticexperience um so I don't even want tonecessarily hear that the post officeworkers it feels like they're goingpostal necessarily it depends thecontext and the the tone of theconversation I feel bad when a parent ora child well more when a parent goesonto facebook or something like that andsays something about their child thatthey're worried about their kid orsomething like that that would make memore nervous because I feel like Iworried that that kid isn't getting thetype of support that clearly you're agreat parent you've gone out and andsought all these resources for your kinnot all of us are that lucky so if youhave adoption papers and we can sign upthat's great this is Bernice were you inthis in the new openness or alleged newopenness about mental illness well Ithink it's absolutely the case one ofthe things that we found was thatcompared to the 1950s and then comparingthat also to the 1970s that there aretwo big winners in terms of greateropenness with regard to mental illnessand one is the willingness to talk tofamily and friends that wasn't there inthose earlier decades and the second wasthe desire to talk to non-medical mentalhealth professionals like counselors andsocial workers and psychologists andthat that's a big change that we saw inthat comparison over time in the US so Ithink there is greater openness on thisand I think part of that also arisesfrom looking at the national comorbiditystudies and seeing numbers like 1 in 3you know at some point in our lives allof us will experience some kind ofmental health problem and once we have asense that it's not them it's us I thinkwe will start to see some change and Ithink we have turned a corner but we'rea little bit sad about not finding anyreal change in prejudice over the last10 years in our latest study it'sinteresting you know when I was a youngboy my dad was a neurologist and my hisbrother my uncle a psychiatrist theywould fight all the time back in the1950s my dad would say this is allchemical this is not about you knowsitting down with this person andblaming the mom or the self right theis a chemical difference you'll see sothis was the fight over our dinner tableand in a way my dad has won thisargument which is to say it sort ofunderstood now that a lot of this is canbe treated with drugs and maybe beganwith with a chemical imbalance or insome way the brain is different becausea person was born that way it'scertainly not to blame of the person ortheir parents you think that fact thatenlightened fact would have sort ofopened the society up completely to seethis is no different from getting cancerit hasn't happened right your study saysthis has not happened it hasn't happenedand there are studies that also suggestthat as Americans embrace the idea thatthere may be genetic causes or abiological reality to this it also seemsto be connected to an idea of permanenceand therefore the rejection and thestigma remains because they don't wantnecessarily people with mental illnessthat they still define as the othermarrying into their family or workingclosely next to the job on them when infact they probably are working close tothem on the job but people don't want todisclose for fear of this prejudice Ithink it's also that there aren't toolsof how to deal with it properly thatwe'll talk about these things I don'tknow how often this happens for you guysbut I'll often say oh that guy seemslike he's slightly on the spectrum heseems slightly autistic or like that ina very casual way just to say that theperson doesn't have social skills um butthat doesn't mean that I know better howto handle that when I'm confronted withit and so I think that the the problemis not that we're not aware about theissues but it hasn't made us more adeptat figuring out how to deal with it inthe workplace or know what the rightthing to say I mean part of what you'retrying to do is you know not just do thebest job you can with your daughter butto reach out to the wider community tellus about that work well that's what wedo at nami to piggyback of what she saidthat's what we're really doing that meanwe try to educate and I believe thateducation is the key a lot of familiesthat I work with are from Caribbeanculture background the Latino communityand like you said they know their childor their loved one has an illness orthere's something wrong with them butthey don't know really how to deal withitto the courses in the support group thatwe offer at nami we help them to how tocommunicate with that child you cannotreally communicate with a child with abrain disorder or a mental illness thesame way you will communicate with anormal a child so to the courses and thesupport groups we teach them how to talkto the child how to reduce meltdown howto understand the different chemicals inthe brain neurotransmitter is the thegaba periodic acid what's working what'snot working in the brain and how tofigure out and we also we also try tohelp them to see that it's not theirfault a lot of parents come in fouryears society's blaming them you knowfamily members are blaming them and tocome into a group with other familymembers with other parents and to hearsomebody tell you this is not your faultit's a huge turn around you know youwant to hear more you want to knowexactly what can you do to help thesechildren and help that your loved oneswe teach them a lot about the brain welet them know that the brain is onlythree pounds and the 33 pounds argan youknow has the has to make the whole bodyfunction and what's working and what'snot working you know we look at it asand I always tell my parents we look atit as a mission instead of a burden andthat's how I started looking at mydaughter's illness look at it as amission which means that we face eachcircumstances with empathy we try toempathize what that loved one is goingthrough yes it's also changed in howpsychology is understood when I wasstudying when you're talking about youryou know uncle and dad I mean at thattime you came was much more FridayFreudian and you came out of the wombcompletely damaged and the fact that youeven were in there in the first placewas a traumatizing experience and nowyou know you're mainly whole that's howmost therapists approach things now thatyou're mainly hole and you may havethese issues right specific issues thatyou need to cope with even when you havesomething like bipolar disorder thatyou're going to struggle with for therest of your life or something like thatso I do think that the framework haschanged that makes it easier for parentsand lay people to get involved and belike okay how can I be more helpful ormore empathetic as long as I'm not inthe dentist chair right but I do thinkthis suggests also that we need to turnthe corner on how we move furtherbecause if the American public hasalready embraced these issues of youknow causes located in the brainand they have and I know that that'sharder for parents and and the childrenthemselves to deal with these issues butif American society understands that andyet they're still stigmatizingindividuals then I think we need to movetoward exactly what you were talkingabout which is how do you handle this inthe workplace and I think the Brits arefar ahead of us with their new campaignwhere rather than educating about adisease like any other what they'redoing is that their new PSAs for examplefocus on how do you talk to somebody inthe workplace who's come back from amedical leave because they had a mentalhealth problem and I think that wereally need to rethink how we're goingto go through the next phase of reducingstigma and you're about to do aninternational study right we're in themiddle of an international study we'rejust about to receive our data fromChina and this was this was important tous because you know one of the thingsthat we've heard for decades is well youknow we one of the reasons why peoplewith mental illness aren't treated aswell in the United States one of thereasons they don't get as well as inother countries is because we are morestigmatizing than countries like Indiaand China where people are much more youknow attached to their village lives andto each other and they're connecting toone another I have to tell you ourinitial findings are not that way at allreally yes but what about a smallcountry like Norway or something good isthere lie slit Louis country hanging atthe bottom in terms of most acceptingleast stigmatizing Iceland I don't howdo you what do you make of that well Ithink it is a society it's goinconsidered one of the great welfarestates in the world and has it anincredible amount of tolerance towardsdifference and so I think and then theyalso have a great deal of solidarityamong the Icelandic population I meanthey are pretty homogeneous you to jumpin here well yeah cuz they're not meanyou're just saying what I was gonna saythat they're not so different so theycan have a real tolerance of it becausemost people look the same there but ithink our culture is much better thanmost at talking about issues when youwere naming when you're naming otherwestern countries who are even moreconcerned and advocate for health careso they're great about preventivehealthcare across the board whether it'smental or physical and see theconnectionbut that's certainly not the case iwould imagine in china or india no iagree with you absolutely but the reasonwe did this study is that there's astandard you read every psych textbookand they say that that the mostimportant finding in mental healthservices research in the last 25 yearsis that people recover more fromschizophrenia or better fromschizophrenia in the developing worldand in the developed world and i have tosay as a social scientist that kind ofmade the hair on the back of my neckstand up so we figured we needed to jumpin there and see if we could really geta good comparative study of the way thatthe larger culture is shaped towardpeople with mental illness across theglobe thank you I wish we had more timebecause we could go on for well quite abit yeah but this week therapy sessionthey're always short it's always overthere's always that two clocks rightexactly and you charge the same amountthat you will be charged for a full hourback in the 50s that's the way it goesup next putting the park back in ParkAvenue a new kind of high line perhapsfor the east side call it the snap shotheard round the world take a look atthis hour kifle photo of Manhattan'sPark Avenue in 1920 taken well beforethe eight Lane Boulevard we know todaythe image went viral online and became agreen space call to arms a call veryrecently answered at this year'sMunicipal Art Society summit our nextguest suggests the return of a ParkAvenue promenade similar to the onepictured and with Mayor Bloombergsupport of Upper East Side rezoning itmay be the perfect time to make ithappen joining us our shop architectspartners VaShawn chakrabarti and ChrisSharples or Sharples I should say youmay have heard of shop in the newslately because they designed brooklyn'sbarclays so first congrats on thatpeople like the like the look of it Icertainly do and it has been called thehelp cause the hell of traffic theypredict it as it it's transit-orientedthere's 11 trains its transit obsessedsection yes another thirdthat they're running again right rightexactly so this possibility of a kind ofwhat ground level low line on the eastside tell us tell us about this idea anddid it come from this photo you happento cross or what in part it this allcomes in the context of the Bloombergadministration proposing you know largenew skyscrapers modern skyscrapers forthe Park Avenue area really in the sortof lower 50s above grand central andnorth of Grand Central and that seems tobe fine but it seems that it should comein concert with really great new publicspace for Midtown because if you'regoing to get taller buildings and soforth you should get a great publicexperience that comes with that rightand and I before we look at what thisidea might become and we have somedrawings that you guys have done Iwanted to get a little bit more of thatcontext which is the taller buildingsliberate other space tell me about sortof the theory behind taller buildingsand more space is that sort of thecurrent thinking and architecture well Ithink one of the things that we'reinterested in especially in terms of ourpractice working in the city is the ideaof density and how we can bring morepeople to city obviously theinfrastructure having goodinfrastructure in place is important butin order to make it work to really havethe sense of quality of life you needthe public open space and what's reallyexciting what's unique to New York isthe canyons the street walls that kneesavenues produce and being on Park Avenuewhen you cross it you don't really looknorth-south you're sort of lookingstraight ahead but to actually stand inthe middle of the Avenue and look northsouth and really get a sense no othercity has that type of experience and itused to be that there was no streetthere right I mean it was basically ableit was all they were Street but themedian was about 56 feet wide so therewas there was treat bed but there's alot less street bed than there is todaycan we take a look at that can we bringbring up a picture of what was and whatwill be there was a little room fortraffic light right yes yes you justcan't see it in the image but therewere cars that could move that debtpictures from about 1920 by an earth didthey undo this well it it graduallyhappened over time and it's as ourcities in our society became much moreauto oriented and you saw ultimately yousaw the demise of Penn Station it wasmuch later in the early 60s but reallyit happened through several decades aswe thought that the car was the best wayto move until we got this take a lookover yes and you see what happened whichis the median still there the medianactually performs a very importantfunction because all of Park Avenue sitsabove active rail tracks and the medianhelps actually to ventilate those railtracks but you know it's grown a bitshabby or over time it still has somepublic art on occasion which brightensit up our proposed r has won the car hasclearly won and it's become a canyon theprevious shot was not a canyon it was aseries of buildings right and so wethink that you should at least have theright balance between vehicular trafficand a great pedestrian space and wethink we've struck that balance we'veactually even introduced left turn laneswhich we think could help unclog some ofthe traffic on Main Avenue so let's lookat this is well let's just widen thisout to see what it would look like ifyou make the change right where's thisright there's a previous image thatshowed the current condition this is theproposed condition right this is what Iit leaves a lot of car traffic yes itdoes it does it still leaves two lanesof active traffic as well as parkinglanes for people you know there'sparking and drop-offs in the Waldorfneeds a drop off and so forth but thereare left turns when it would be requiredand that gets those cars out of the wayof the through traffic but what it doesmarty is it expands a 20-foot medianthat you can occupy to a 40-foot medianthat you can occupy stroll in put publicart in and really have this greatconnection from Grand Central Stationall the way up to Central Park so who'sin favor of this and who is not you getany sense of the politics of it and areyou in a hurry because this mayor who isso friendly to this kind of thing is onhis last months well we're certainlyhoping the Bloomberg administration istaking it very seriously and we've heardthat they arelooking at it obviously people who arewho drive to work and park avenue or getdropped off are worried about increasedtraffic because of increased congestioni think the city has to study it veryseriously to understand what kind ofcongestion impact it would have we don'tworry about that they were worried aboutthat when the white and did this tobroadway right and made it walkable andit didn't yes suppose too much for pressand the same yes and our sametransportation Commissioner is one ofthe greatest transportationcommissioners in our history understandsto strike this balance between peopleand cars right i mean you're architectsand your dreamers and and you're afounder of shop but you also have tosort of operate in the real world sowhen you design you have to design forthe possible so it has a chance ofgetting made i guess you could win acharrette or something if it did not butbut you really want to make thingshappen right so this one has a chanceyou think i think in terms of some ofthe work that we've done with the cityespecially with the east river esplanadei mean when we started that I thinkwe're in our a here on that we'vefinished phase one last spring we're infor the long haul but it one thing thatwe've learned is that it's not justabout design it's it's it'sunderstanding that this is a complexenvironment that we operate in and thecity working with you know the communityboards with the city administration youknow the d-o-t state and local andreally starting to understand what areall those forces and then that's whatinforms our design criteria the keythough is to have a vision a concept andwork towards that we're always checkingare we are we delivering it was theconcept behind this oh this is whatwe're seeing right yes this this is thepart of this is pure 15 which opened uplast spring it is one of the parts ofthe east river esplanade that we'vebecome what battery what street are wethis is this is up between john streetand and wall in that in that stretch andthe concept you're working toward wellthe concept here is really there's about500 I believe 500 linear miles ofwaterfront if you took all five boroughshere the mayor wants to connect them alltogether so our job here with thisstretch this two-mile stretch is toreally help complete the Manhattan loopan access of course is the key right nowdoesn't the problem with the East Riveris that lovely highway that makes it soaccessible and quiet and we actually tryto make the highway a kind of featurethat we've put some pavilions underneathit and make it much more well lit and soforth so that it's much easier totraverse and get across to the waterright under and over both over would bevery hard because it'd be very expensivebut but under is where the streets areand so that's where the people are andwhat are we looking at here this is aproposal that we're working on with ourclient BFC this is right at the foot ofthe staten island ferry terminal onStaten Island side right I see the boatgo yeah so yes the ship coming in andreally what this is this is a big emptyparking lot right now it's right on thewaterfront and it's about 300,000 squarefeet of retail as well as 120 room hoteland the idea is that part of theshopping experience that would be veryunique here is usually when you'rebrought to a shopping experience it'sall about be is like being in a casinothey never want you to see the light ofday this is completely different it'sall open air and you're constantlylooking back and forth to the skyline oflower Manhattan and the harbor as wellas being connected back up to the uplandand st. George so we think that's goingto be a great experience for bothvisitors and Staten Islanders that'sgreat the uncus I know yeah I like itright um finally this if it happens andthere is a low line high line on ParkAvenue it'll be between what streetsinitially we proposed between 40basically 45th street excuse meforty-sixth Street and 57th Street sothat would be the first phase we wouldthink and the importance of that Martyis that it's not just a park where youcan go eat your sandwich well we'velearned whether it's through the EastRiver or the high line is that New Yorkis about great new experiences and thatattracts visitors and residents andtourists we think that's what will makethis really special that it's a greatexperience along that promenade and youagree absolutely all right then we'redonecertainly were out of time we could talkabout this for a long time but we're outof time thanks for coming in both of youthank you after the break one team whosegood idea led to more beautifuldumpsters if you're ever in st. Louisyou are likely to see somethingextraordinarily beautiful no not theGateway Arch but that is nice too it'sthose normally hideous giant trashdumpsters in st. Louis local artistshave painted them in a hundred differentways and because they are trucked aroundthe city all the time it's like there'san ongoing traveling art show this allhappened because of one teenager JacobSchmidt he was taking out the trash oneday he joins us via Skype from st. Louisto tell us his story hi Jake hi thankyou for having me yes Jake so you takinout the trash to one of those littledumpsters right yeah yeah the alleywaydumpsters and what were you thinking uhI was really just you know going aroundmy usual business and around this time Iwas really wondering like what could Ido to to beautify my community and Irealized that these dumpsters that Iwere was taking the dump the trash outto was really an ugly thing and it hadso much potential to be beautiful I meanbasically these are 3d canvases that meas an artist and all these other artistscan work with right so you've got thesethat this is the small ones and you'vegot permission to from whom to do thefirst three well I contacted my olderwoman and she helped me get all thenecessary paperwork donchu this but justto paint three of the little one's rightup to two little ones just outside myhouse right and then you wanted youhoped to get permission to do this allover town right yeah yeah and whathappened huge dream and what happened ohwell I started into this huge process oftrying to take this dream and like getpermission get funding and organize ateam to actually make this a citywideproject um so I raised four thousanddollars through Kickstarter um and Iorganthe team over the course of a couplemonths and it was really surprisingly areally long process to try to getpermission from the city um and we wereat this time we were still trying towork out details for the alleywaydumpsters um let me do it make you jumpahead a little bit cuz you don't havethat much time but but these littlealleyway dumpsters it didn't work outbut then you got permission to do thebig dumpsters right right and so we gotpermission and it was really great westarted painting during the summer andwe were seeing one right now a beautifulone with looks like a tiger's eye yeahyeah and when you say we I mean you'rean artist yourself though an 18 year oldkid and and so what who did you draft todo all this painting well it reallybecame this organic experience I justhold a bunch of friends and they broughta bunch of their friends and really justword got out to the artist community ofst. Louis and it really ruined to thisamazing thing oh and now we're seeinganother wonderful blue one and I can'ttell exactly what's going on oh it lookslike some kind of upside-downmulticolored fish oh that's beautifullet's see another let's see what we gotowned em there's two of them with onescary-looking a low face on it and let'ssee another oh that's gorgeous and is ittrue I heard this under sort ofgrapevine that that the it used to bewhen they were just numbered and theyall look alike in hideous and orangethat they that the guys who moved themaround the city to pick up trash wouldwould order them by the numbers and nowthey're calling them by their yeah lookthe best things about the outcome ofwhat exactly how do they designate themnow um they I mean they've been callingby subject they calmed by like thevulture there's one of a big vulture andthey just call it the vulture and it'sjust everybody knows what they'retalking about it is a review it's areally great feeling to to get all thesupport from all these different peopleand you get to see them sort of go by asthey're cut it around the city to pickup trash or special events or whateverright yeah yeah a lot of people actuallytexted me gave me a phone call sayinglike oh i just saw one of your dumpstersand yeah it's a really great thing tojust see one of these dumpsters on mystreet I've seen a couple on the streetand now we're seeing that the swimmerlooks like a marks business of having athat's always that that is actuallyMichael Phelps it was painted during theOlympics we only have a minute left butyou've got to proliferate this idea ofget an idea and do something about itwith a kind of TED talk with a cola TEDxtalk yeah and that's all the way to NewYork right yeah yeah it was a greatexperience this um this conference wasjust so alive with so many differentpresenters from like the teachers thatactually worked at the schools um theywere just so involved with this projectthere but what's your message to the tothe students of New York what was theessence of your TED talk just okay I wastalking to a bunch of kids and um it wasreally just about taking that big dreamthis big dream to do something in yourcommunity and to turn into reality umand I showed them this project and Ireally talked about the whole processand everything Jake I wish we had moretime we could look at more dumpsterswhich always sounds like a bad idea butactually in this case a beautiful ideabut thank you very much for coming onthank you finally tonight moving on fromdumpsters a you have to I'm sure agreewith me that it's a wonderful time ofyear Christmas time in New Yorkespecially in midtown Manhattan Idecided to walk over to RockefellerCenter after work last Friday to gaze atthe big tree and to watch the skatersand to peel some hot chestnuts and thatwould have been wondrous enough but thenI bumped into thiswhoaWowNohowI'm not sure that raises extra money forthe Salvation Army's good works but itsure lifts the spirit and that's ourprogram for today we roll out a newprogram every Wednesday Brian Lehrerwill be back next week I'm Martygoldenson thanks for watchingyou