Anthony Bourdain Hotel Burns, Sad Gen Z House Party Question, & More
Around the College Towns: Links and commentary related to urbanism and higher ed for the week of June 5 - July 11.
Note: I am back in the US! I am still getting over my jetlag, but my Around the College Town post is fully on this week. In these weekend posts, I cover aspects of education and urbanism (broadly defined) that have fallen through the cracks.
Bourdain-Featured Hotel Burns Down
The Hotel Oloffson was burned to the ground in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I recall the iconic hotel from an old Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations episode. He draws his descriptions from Graham Greene’s novel The Comedians, which was set at the hotel. Tony praised, “It is still, regardless of its condition, one of the world’s great hotels.” Echo of another time, gone now.
The entire episode itself is memorable. Particularly, the portion where Tony decides to buy out a local vendor to give to the local onlookers. There was a small riot and some violence. “It all turned to shit,” as he describes. He compares it to a metaphor for international aid organizations, e.g., thinking with “heart” and short-term, rather than thinking it through and long-term.
He sits and has a nice meal conversation with Richard A. Morse, the owner of the hotel. The hotelier talks about the better days for the hotel and the country. The hotel had been a hotbed for artists, writers, and journalists. It had slowed to a trickle of guests, he explains.
Tony himself later criticized the show’s “unintended and very ugly consequences.” He did not want to be viewed as the typical wealthy Westerner swooping into the country for a quick photo-op and poorly planned “help.” Although he does bring on Sean Penn for a segment, taking him through his aid organization after the earthquake.
While he does try to address the obvious juxtaposition, “I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking another Hollywood [expletive] down here for his closeup and then on to the next film, the next cause, the next thing,” Tony narrates. “Not so.“
Penn even says, “There is a long history of failed aid here.” He was trying to do it right. Bourdain later in the episode says Haiti isn’t at all like what is depicted in Western media, highlighting artists, people rebuilding, and, of course, delicious Creole food.
Despite telling us these things in the episode, it was more the showing that viewers seemed to stick with me. Even though I was drawn to the particular hotel, I recall not coming away with the best image of the country. It was all so sad.
Watching Bourdain when I was younger, he always inspired me to want to visit the places he featured. I think one reason why this Haiti episode stuck out for me was because it was one of the few depictions that made me not want to visit a place.
I guess it was the honesty in Bourdain’s storytelling that drew so many people to him. There was no sugarcoating; he was showing a place like it was. That meant all the beautiful humanity, but also the warts of reality.
There are certainly inspiring moments in the episode, but it was obviously a tough setting, one that had just been devastated by an earthquake. Now, with the news of more unrest in Haiti, it seems the place is still in a rough spot.
Bourdain, the master storyteller and traveler, I think, knew all of this already. He closed the episode with, “It’s easy to push the bad stuff out of our consciousness, try and forget, move on. But it always seems to come back.”
So I will never get to visit Hotel Oloffson, the hotel that captured my young imagination. Maybe I never would have, but it’s gone now either way. Like Bourdain himself, everything is ephemeral.
Note: The full episode can be found on YouTube.
Yes, House Parties Were Real
A post on the Gen X subreddit went viral this week when a younger Gen Zer asked the group if parties depicted in teen movies of the era were real. “I love 90s and 2000s movies so much! And all of the teen movies have one of these party scenes, THEY LOOK SO FUN,” posted the user.
“Im Gen Z and have never been to anything like this. So was this a thing that just doesn't happen anymore, or is it just Hollywood trying to make me hate my life more 😭”, they asked.
Of course, the Gen X subreddit, the rest of Reddit, and really the entire internet revealed in discussing their own party days. But there was also serious discussion about the fall of parties and teen socialization in general. Of course, phones play a part, but another point I found particularly interesting was the proliferation of Ring security cameras.
Even
, the prolific writer who recently left The Atlantic and joined Substack, wrote an article grappling with this exact issue. He went beyond teens and connected to the broader social isolation of the entire US. It certainly harkens to things I was talking about in my recent Dazed & Confused article. Worth a read:
Links I’m Reading This Week
Education
Pepperdine dean has 1.7 million TikTok followers. And the school loves that! Social media is the new Impact Factor for professors.
Florida universities are going through a building boom, and Morgan Stanley is investing in student housing in Mississippi. Big things are happening in student housing, but…
University housing provider files for bankruptcy. Going bankrupt in the choice student housing sector is some serious mismangament. Seems like now a legal battle will be playing out in Georgia because the company wants a better deal. Squeeze the students more.
Students at Texas A&M helped push for reform of restrictive tenant laws in their state. With that, the Texas governor signed Senate Bill 1567, which gives more freedom to landowners to choose who they rent to, rather than strict family-only rules that often target college students (aka brothel laws). Kudos to the kids!
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Elon, North Carolina, home of Elon University, rejected a proposed ADU on a house that is two blocks from campus. The complaints kept mentioning concerns of “density,” so I checked the address. Just absurd:
Urbanism
High prices are killing Vegas. The deals of the ‘90s are long gone (or at least long gone from the Strip). Tourism has dropped in raw numbers, so venues are looking at price increases to make up the gaps.
Chula Vista, not too far from me, just cracked down on e-bikes with multiple restrictions. This one in particular annoyed me: “prohibiting the use of Class 1 and 2 e-bikes in business districts and where signs are posted.” So I guess instead of biking up to a store, bikers will have to walk from the far edge of the parking lot. Absurd.
Mass protests in Europe and Mexico over over-tourism. I didn’t see any protests in Japan over tourism, but some places certainly were overrun with tourism. I will have a future post on this.
Around Substack
Note: I also think it’s important to stay connected to the growing Substack community. Here are a few I am reading this week:
at The Future of Statistical Modeling has an article that might be a bit too much “inside baseball” for non-academics. But basically peer reviewers have been using AI to do their work of reviewing academic submissions to journals, so submitters are using hidden hacks to trick AI into giving them a good review. I guess I thought the cyberpunk future would be a little less nerdy…
For consumers, this means that there’s huge potential for transportation to get a lot cheap (at least in Waymo-friendly cities). This, of course, is predicated on their being actual competition in the self-driving taxi space: robotaxis seem to be a preferable service to Uber and Lyft, in no small part because there’s no human driver in the vehicle, and so prices are naturally going to be higher unless there’s competition.
Finally… OKC Mayor Read My Article
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a retrospection on what it meant to the city of OKC for its NBA team, the Thunder, to win an NBA championship. I was happy with the response, especially from people back in OKC.
I could never have guessed that the Mayor of Oklahoma City would have also read my piece. But he did, Mayor David Holt said “Thanks! Good read,” when I linked my article to him via X.
The bad news, though, is that I misquoted his own book title! I cited the wrong mayor as the author of his book, Big League City. I sheepishly acknowledged my error and made the correction.
I do appreciate someone like the Mayor of a major city to even comment on these types of posts. And I should say that his book is another good one for urbanists to take a look at for real-life success stories. Check it out!