Newspapers: Civic Consciences

Renewal. Urban sprawl. Relocation. High rise v. low rise. Blighted areas. Glass-box buildings. Open space. Population density.

For big-city newspapers, some of the most important new language and news in recent years has concerned the condition of the city itself. As billions of dollars are spent on the revitalization of dying downtowns, as crumbling old neighborhoods are bulldozed away, as the past gives way to the present, a hybrid journalist is developing—the urban reporter-critic. Reporting, he keeps citizens abreast of what's going up and coming down, what city planners envision for the future. Criticizing, he serves as a civic conscience—denouncing the banal, calling for conservation of the historic or unique, pointing out that planners who think big sometimes err even bigger.

Subjects of such size often provoke pomposity, but the major critics turn out lively as well as worthy copy.

> Allan Temko, 43, is the hip, peppery critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. He likes to think of himself as a cultural historian with a mass audience. "I have a well-developed jugular instinct when confronted with mediocrity," he says. In the six years he has written for the paper, he has drawn his share of blood. Almost singlehanded, he forced the Catholic Church to revise ultraconventional plans for a new cathedral; he caused the city to change its plans for a bridge spanning south San Francisco Bay. "What a graceful, avant-garde bridge," he says of the finished product, "and they were going to have us driving in a cage over the most beautiful bay in the world." He once complained: "Although I am not especially eager for my daughter to marry one, some of my best friends are engineers." Says Chronicle City Editor Abe Mellinkoff: "Temko's stuff is just as salable as a murder in the Tenderloin."

> Wolf Von Eckardt, 49, a wide-ranging critic for the Washington Post, is a self-appointed protector of Washington monuments past and to come—but he is engagingly unpredictable. He urged the Kennedy cultural center to copy the best features of New York's Lincoln Center. "The camp thing to do is to call Lincoln Center middlebrow or mediocre," he writes, "but I happen to thrill to noble proportions, a festive progression of spaces, and most of all perhaps to the kind of architecture which, like good writing, is so compelling that you don't even notice that it is good." Disagreeing with the editorial position of his own paper, he came out in favor of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial: "Sure, it looks like granite darts. But it's about time we have something in Washington besides Greek temples and Roman edifices—something from the mid-20th century in which we live." Another something he has suggested, only half in jest, is the construction of floating swimming pools in the Potomac—since nobody seems anxious to clean up the polluted river.