Some cities have secret histories that contradict their image. Who would have guessed that Pasadena, in notoriously car-dependent Southern California, was the cycling mecca of the nineteenth century? Bicycle activist Dennis Crowley didn't know it until 1990, when he discovered a museum archive filled with 100-year-old photographs. "I was blown away," Crowley says. "There were more bicycles in Pasa-dena than in any other place west of Chicago. It had the best racetrack in the nation." Most stunning of all, he found, it had the Horace Dobbins Cycleway, an elevated turnpike for bicycles.

The Cycleway opened on January 1, 1900. It re-sembled a wooden roller coaster and was viewed as the future of transportation. But the automobile was invented soon after, and the Cycleway fell into disuse. Eventually the structure was taken down, and in 1940, Pasadena used the land to build the first freeway in the West. Today the Pasadena Freeway is a modern motorist's nightmare--narrow lanes, hairpin turns, short entrance ramps that require 0 to 60 merging in seconds flat. It's also one of the most clogged arteries in L.A.'s congested freeway system. And its path through a canyon called the Arroyo Seco Corridor means it can't be widened or improved. After 30 years of study, Caltrans, the state transit authority, has decided all it can do is promote the freeway as a historic landmark and offer commuters other options.

When he found the old photographs of the Cycleway, Crowley decided he had one such alternative. "It was an idea that wouldn't leave me alone," says the 52-year-old construction manager. "The Cycleway was more than a romantic historic artifact--it was something that would work now."

For the past 10 years, Crowley has argued that the answer to the freeway bottleneck is to rebuild the Cycleway. Instead of a rickety wooden structure, however, Crowley's cycleway would be a 20-foot-wide asphalt "people mover" with passing lanes, emergency maintenance staff, and a minimum speed limit (during rush hour, the cyclists would move faster than the freeway's bumper-to-bumper traffic). Elevated in some spots but ground level for most of its eight miles, it would provide lockers, showers, and bike storage at its terminus, Union Station, downtown L.A.'s transit hub. Crowley calls his idea "the most cost-effective transportation plan ever proposed." He estimates a total project cost of $20-$30 million--the equivalent of what it would take to build a quarter mile of the proposed extension of the Long Beach Freeway through nearby South Pasadena or half a mile of the planned Pasadena Blue Line light rail, which will also pass through the Arroyo Seco.

Crowley may be a dreamer, but he's not idle. Soon after he hit on the cycleway idea, he was on his bike scouting out a potential route within the discouraging welter of hillsides and houses where the freeway parallels the Arroyo Seco River, now a concrete flood channel. Once he started scrambling around in the brush, he made an incredible discovery: The Old Arroyo Road, predecessor to the Pasadena Freeway, was still down in the canyon, hidden by the flood channel. Disused and crumbling, this road covered much of the route--only a few spots would require high-tech solutions (a short tunnel, a bridge over the L.A. River and some railyards, and one cantilevered section around the side of a hill). Crowley says acquiring right of way wouldn't be difficult: 99 percent of his proposed route is in government hands. But when he says the words "bike route," most politicians and planners envision a recreational path for families and rollerbladers. In comparison, Crowley's concept looks wildly expensive. "It's a $20 million project," says Lynne Goldsmith, bicycle coordinator for the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority. "To put this in perspective, MTA has given an average of $4 million a year to bikeways, and that is for all of L.A. County." Crowley argues that his high-speed transportation plan should not be funded by bicycle budgets. "I don't want to compete with the recreational paths," he says. "We need those, too. People still aren't seeing this as a transportation project, and my attitude is that this is an emergency transportation project. That freeway is very close to being dysfunctional."

In December Crowley took me on a bike tour of the cycleway's proposed route. As we crunched over the pot-holed remains of the Old Arroyo Road, accessed through a gap in a fence behind a horse stable, he pointed out the Caltrans maintenance buildings, no longer in use, where he envisions "fueling stations" i.e., coffee and juice bars where commuters could grab breakfast. When I asked about the collection of dumpsters, couches, and other urban detritus piled up along the route, Crowley explained that the L.A. parks department uses the road as a dump. The area's only other patrons are the "bad boys and bad girls," as Crowley calls them, who hang out in the flood channel and graffiti its walls. "They're just bored," he says. "The cycleway could hire them to fix flat tires."

This unused road also links the Arroyo's collection of sad, isolated parks. With the cycleway passing through, Crowley says, they'd be rediscovered, as would Heritage Square, a museum-like collection of Victorian houses that has few visitors because of its lack of parking lot or freeway sign. On another of his visionary riffs, Crowley suggests that Heritage Square would be a great location for a bicycle museum. Wooing the support of local historians isn't a bad strategy--preservationists are a powerful group in the Arroyo, which was the cradle of the California Arts and Crafts movement. Unfortunately, many of them see a high-speed cycleway as one more concrete structure in an already overbuilt area. "The Arroyo Seco is not just a transportation route," says Nicole Possert of Highland Park Heritage Trust, a local preservation society. "We live and breathe here. Hasn't our community given enough with the freeway and the channelization of the river?"

Possert, who works for the National Audubon Society, is also worried about the area's natural habitat, which supports a surprising number of bird species. "Improving greenbelts with meandering bike paths is wonderful, but asphalt and more pavement and lights is not," she says, explaining that the Audubon Society hopes to create a wildlife center in a local park.

"I want to see trees down there, too," Crowley responds. "I don't want to see it all concrete." Indeed, the cycleway's appeal relies on its scenery: leafy parks, WPA bridges, historic houses, the anomalous sight of plants and birds living in the concrete flood channel. "To get people out of their cars," Crowley says, "we have to give them a pleasant, superior experience."

While these differences might be resolved with the right design, finding the money to pay for the structure remains a hurdle. But as more people start to see the car as a culprit of sprawl, pollution, and a degraded quality of life, the bicycle's visibility is on the rise--and so is funding. Crowley has always known that a big-ticket item like the cycleway must rely on a patchwork of support, and there are a growing number of sources in the works: a proposed bill that would raise the California state bicycle budget from $1 million a year to $1 million a month; an L.A. County resolution to extend an existing recreational path in the Arroyo Seco flood channel; and a Caltrans application for a Federal Scenic Byways grant, which would designate the Pasadena Freeway a scenic resource and provide funds for tourism improvements in the Arroyo, including bike trails.

Although this harmonic convergence of interest in bikes and the Arroyo Seco could create the support Crowley has been seeking, it also means that there will be more ideas competing for funds. Crowley's persistence has generated interest in a neglected area, and no doubt something will come of it--but ironically, it may not be a true cycleway. In addition to the naturalists who have started planting trees in the path of his proposed route, the area's many pedestrian and equestrian users want to be included in any discussion of a linear park along the flood channel. In Crowley's version, not only does the cycleway cure congestion and cut pollution, it saves neglected parks and an unappreciated museum, keeps kids out of trouble, and revitalizes urban neighborhoods. "I like these people," he says of the locals with other ideas. "But they're trying to save a tree, and I'm trying to save the world."
--Karen E. Steen

The latest British TV import is a strange cross between The Real World and This Old House. In The 1900 House, which airs on PBS this month, school inspector Joyce Bowler, her marine husband, Paul, and four of their five children leave a modern home to live for three months as lower-middle-class Victorians. This means nice furniture and calm evenings by the fire, but also gas lighting, corsets, limited hot water, and homemade sanitary napkins.

Daru Rooke, a curator at a Victorian-history museum in Leeds, oversaw the transformation of a South London house into a 1900 home, and the show's first episode focuses on his extensive "renovation." Builders discover original gas piping and install a range for cooking and heating. Rooke says that it wasn't possible to equip the house with all the latest turn-of-the-century technologies, like a "gas geyser" for heating bath water; they would have been too dangerous. Lead paint and arsenic-laced wallpaper were also nixed. Still, we watch as skeptical safety inspectors offer more than 50 suggestions, from "reinstalling electricity" to "removing the cutthroat razor." As the four-part series continues, the house proves to be more of a dusty nuisance than a deathtrap. And though the producers tease us with "on the next episode" snippets of distressed Bowlers, viewers hoping for a gas explosion or at least a domestic blowup will be disappointed.

The Bowlers beat out 400 other families to be on the show. Rooke estimates that 20 percent of the applicants were "nutters" who live in the "wilds of Wales," use only paraffin lamps, and make their children play with hoops. It wouldn't be much fun to see them cope without a computer.

Difficulties abounded: "A week into the experiment," the narrator calmly intones, "Joyce's skin has been stripped of all its natural oils by soda crystals and hot water." But now the Bowlers look back fondly on the experience. They will no doubt enjoy watching The Frontier House, an American version that is currently in development. In comparison to participants who must hunt for their food, the Bowlers may well feel they had a holiday.--Jared Hohlt

A Wall to Wall Television production for Channel 4 in association with Thirteen/WNET New York, The 1900 House premieres on PBS on June 12. Check local listings for time.

If you're a design-magazine junkie, hunch may be your perfect fix: At 192 pages, it provides hours worth of eye candy to page through. But this new English-language journal of the Berlage Institute, the Dutch postgraduate architecture and urbanism school, is also serious about dissolving the boundaries between contemporary architecture and other disciplines. In the first issue, Bart Lootsma breaks the story of Rem Koolhaas's early careers in journalism and film in the 1960s (aspiring architects take note). It's the kind of article that makes you wonder why no one has written it before.

Hunch is edited by Jennifer Sigler (editor of S,M,L,XL) and designed by Simon Davies of the Rotterdam-based SCD Design. The title was chosen to characterize the mood of the institute, where multiple "hunches" are explored, nurtured, challenged, and developed. To read hunch, Sigler suggests in an editorial note, is perhaps "to unlearn how to think about, talk about, look at, interact with, and even make architecture. But that's only a hunch."

In addition to the Koolhaas exposé, other first-issue highlights include architects Stan Allen, Stefano Boeri, and Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos on Los Angeles, Tokyo, and the Randstad, Holland. There's also a witty photo-essay by Roemer van Toorn on understanding the idea of a new modernity.

Hunch isn't the Berlage Institute's only recent step in its quest to constantly reinvent itself. This summer, the institute will move from Amsterdam to Rotterdam--Europe's official cultural capital of 2001 and home to a host of both young and established architecture and design offices.
.--Paul Makovsky

For subscription information contact the Berlage Insti-tute at
(31-20) 428-5080 or www.berlage-institute.nl.

"The only way and means to lead a worthy human life is to have one's own project, to conceive it and bring it to its realization." So say Ilya and Emilia Kabakov of their Palace of Projects, on view at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, June 14 to July 13. The large, nautilus-shaped structure houses 65 models and drawings for plans to better the world, each presented as the work of an ordinary person. E. Lidina, for example, a fictional fourth grader from Moscow, proposes building darkened, soundproof closets where harried citizens can momentarily escape the noise and confusion of the city. Everything Important Is Always on the Right (at right), is purported to come from one N. Zelenin, a chauffeur in Magnito-gorsk who believes that if you hang a painting to the left of your desk, its beauty and value will grant clarity to the rest of your life.

With the Palace of Projects, the Kabakovs are proclaiming that creative ideas are not the province of artists or inventors, but of anyone who looks at the world around him and imagines a way it could be better.--Anne Guiney

For three days Chris Doohan, a 40-year-old vascular technologist, was instructed on how to dance, how to sing, how to dress, and how to contour himself like country crooner Garth Brooks. On his last day of training, he was shaking in his borrowed cowboy boots as he Garthed before a live audience and television crew. Welcome to the latest church of the celebrity, where we not only worship our idols but shape ourselves into them.

Doohan's transformation took place on the new syndicated television show Your Big Break, where costumed soundalikes compete for $25,000 and a recording contract with the guaranteed release of a single. Participants don't seem to mind that their big break comes in the form of repackaging themselves as someone else, but it's hard to imagine what a record contract will do for the winner. It's unlikely that Joe Schmo Sings Wayne Newton (Just Like Wayne Newton) will resonate with a fickle music-buying public.

Everything about Your Big Break is based on a belief in packaging. Can you sing well? Who cares? Do you also kind of look like Steven Tyler of Aerosmith? Great. Even the host, House Party homey Chris "Kid" Reid of Kid 'N Play fame, has been drastically remade with a severely mowed hairstyle and suits instead of sweats. Some contestants naturally look and sound like the people they're nicking (a recent Louis Armstrong imitator seemed like Satchmo back from the dead); others are dolled up with accessories to help build the illusion (an Asian man doing Elton John was propped with big, funky sunglasses). Professor Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Television, calls it "doing Hollywood drag," and says the draw of this kind of cloning is very strong. "There's a sexual dimension to this that's humming very, very loudly in the background of the entire program," he says.

The makeover is helped by a stage design that enhances the theatrical experience. Like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and Greed, Your Big Break has a dark set and uses spotlights to let us know that the audience is really there. The pièceè de résistance is an outsized gold archway traversing a set of doors. After a taped segment on the contestant's personal life, he or she greets Reid and the audience and is then ushered to the threshold. The contestant turns to wave as the doors open--releasing clouds of smoke--and then ventures through. A split second later, through the magic of editing, our real person reappears, metamorphosed into his favorite singer. Fog billows as our performer walks down three steps and begins to sing. Your Big Break producer Larry Klein sees this as a key element in the show. "It's like when you see a magician and he's doing a trick," he says. "Well, if they cut away to the audience and then come back to the magician, then I think the trick is fixed." But this sleight of hand doesn't pull a fast one on anybody. Your Big Break is all about the tricks; the only thing on the show that's not doctored is the performer's voice, which Reid constantly reminds us is the product of "everyday people really singing."

Chris Doohan didn't win during his segment, but he didn't mind losing to a Frankie Valli doppelganger; he got the biggest boost of his life during the production anyway. Someone next door at The Tonight Show had heard Doohan and, mistakenly believing it was his friend Garth Brooks, wanted to say hi. "It was the ultimate compliment," Doohan says. For him, trading in his 15 minutes of fame dressed up as someone else was just as satisfying as earning it by being himself. --Caryn B. Brooks

Your Big Break airs on local network affiliates on weekends and late nights. Check local listings for times and stations.

Each day thousands of New Yorkers walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, stroll along the Coney Island boardwalk, or sit on benches in public parks. But what few of them know is that these familiar urban features have distant origins. All are made of tropical hardwoods from Amazonian rain forests, and each year the city spends close to a million dollars on additional tropical hardwoods for repairs. During the last five years, American environmental groups have lobbied the city government to stop importing this wood, but the effort was stepped up earlier this year when a group of Peruvians traveled some 4,000 miles by boat, pickup truck, and plane to plead their case for the cessation of tropical-hardwood logging.

After meetings with the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in New York, the Peruvians headed for city hall. "New York City is the largest municipal consumer of tropical hardwoods in North America," said Joan Roney of Brooklyn-based Rainforest Relief, who joined the group. "And we want to stop that."

One of the visitors was Lily La Torre López, a lawyer for some indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon. Through an interpreter she explained that during the last two years, as the Peruvian government has auctioned rights to log mahogany, cedar, and other woods to foreign timber concessions, the plight of indigenous Amazonians has worsened.

"Their environment is being destroyed, and through contact with loggers they are catching diseases for which they have no immunity," she said. Miguel Angel Visse Mani, a representative of three tribes that have intentionally isolated themselves, added that his tribe, the Harakmbut, had declined from 30,000 to 1,500 after a measles epidemic started by a petroleum worker some 30 years ago.

Those opposed to rain-forest logging have specific solutions in mind. In 1998 city councilman Gifford Miller sponsored a bill that would require the city to buy only tropical hardwoods certified as being responsibly harvested. The bill passed in committee, but is on hold due to an appeal. Marcel Van Ooyen, a spokesman for Miller, says that the councilman is drafting a new bill that would require such certi-fication for other old-growth timbers in addition to tropical hardwoods.

Rainforest Relief, whose members have protested by climbing to the top of the rickety 250-foot Coney Island Parachute Jump and chaining themselves to metal shelves in a local Home Depot, have a stronger suggestion. They propose that if the city switched from tropical hardwoods to a long-lasting composite substance made from recycled wood and plastic, they would save not only trees but landfill space. The Parks Department has begun using the composite material for benches in the outer boroughs, but when City Hall Park was reopened in October after a 10-month renovation, the Parks Department used an Amazonian wood called ipé for the new benches. The reason cited was "tradition," a rationale that environmentalists describe as specious, pointing out that until 10 years ago benches in City Hall Park were made of domestic wood.

Aside from lobbying, one of the objectives of the visit to New York was to see where Amazonian wood ends up after it is exported. "Lily and Miguel have never seen wood from their homeland that is now in the city, so we're going to show them some examples," Roney said. The group met Van Ooyen on the steps of city hall, but a guard blocked their entrance to the building, where they had hoped to view a mahogany table in the city council chambers. They were, however, able to find other tropical hardwoods within yards of the mayor's office: the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, for example, made of greenheart from Guyana. In City Hall Park, near the foot of the bridge, Mani and López stood next to a bench made of ipé. "This wood could've come from our home," Mani said. López nodded. "This bench represents the life of one person," she said, turning to point to the rest of the benches in the park, "and all this wood represents the genocide of an entire people." --Colin Moynihan