Two Hundred Dead Dogs and Still No Leads

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It was an early spring morning when Jonathan Midgley met the Bowen Road dog poisoner.

“I was going to fly to Singapore later that day on business and I took my dogs for a walk,” he said recently. “I had a white Maltese named Ralph and a reddy-brown village dog, a stray, named Ruth. I went around a bend, called the dogs. They didn’t come. Then I saw them near a man with a cheap supermarket bag in his hand, putting food on the ground.”

Midgley, a criminal defence lawyer, confronted the man and peered inside the plastic bag. There were chicken scraps inside, which the man claimed he was using to feed birds. “I kept him talking but the dogs seemed fine and eventually I let him go,” said Midgley.

After the man vanished from sight, however, Ruth began to tremble and vomit. Midgley put her in the back of his car and rushed her to a vet. She survived, but only after having her stomach pumped, receiving an intravenous drip and spending three days in the clinic.

That was in 1995. Nearly 16 years later, more than 72 dogs have been poisoned around Bowen Road, a quiet, thickly-forested lane running along the slope below Hong Kong’s exclusive Victoria Peak. The man or woman responsible is still on the loose. At least two dogs have been poisoned in December and tainted meat has been found along Bowen Road on several occasions since November.

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Seen and Unseen: Street View Meets Brazil

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Google Street View has landed in Brazil, and its timing is probably no accident: it’s a momentous point in the country’s history. Latin America’s sleeping giant seems, at last, to be climbing into its proper place in the global pecking order: it’s an increasingly assertive diplomatic force that’s put the B in the rising “BRIC” countries and wooed the world to become the future site of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics. All that means Brazil will be the focus of intense scrutiny over the next decade, no more so than in its cities, whose violent reputation might be the most jarring objection to the narrative that the country’s trajectory is is headed nowhere but up.

Such is the bilious stereotype of Brazil’s urban barrios that even intrepid street photographers often refrain from unsheathing their SLRs even a block or two from the most upscale streets or highly visited tourist attractions. For virtual investigators, armchair travelers and Firefox flaneurs alike, that opens up a lot of virgin territory to explore via Street View. Take one of Brazil’s most celebrated neighborhoods, Rio’s Ipanema. It’s renown worldwide for its beach scene, but also boasts largely blocks of rarely-documented inland avenues.

I’d pointed my browser only a few blocks from the the virtual beach, on a digitized representation of Rua Visc. de Paraja, when I made my first Brazilian Street View discovery: colorfully pink and blue intersections, which look like tropicalized versions of the scramble crossings common to the busiest corners of Tokyo. Coming across these flamingo-hued florescent bursts helped convince me that Street View might be as adept at validating positive stereotypes of a colorful, festive Brazil as it is said to have been in disproving negative ones faced by other societies — like South Africa, where Street View was also unveiled in time for a World Cup — which the media similarly allows to appear locked in a desperate struggle with urban violence and destitution.

But it’s important not to take a too-naive view of Street View, which, like any recording or imaging technology, inevitably somewhat distorts its subject. Street View’s format — static images taken from a slightly elevated perspective in the middle of the street, make it easier to disregard some of the country’s most persistent urban problems. That’s likely true for many of the developing countries increasingly cruised by Google’s cars. Via Street View, it’s simply easier to stroll (or rather, scroll) through what might otherwise be unease-inducing neighborhoods filled with less than friendly sights, sounds, and smells — and the often distinct impression of being unwelcome. For these very same reasons, though, the technology helps virtual visitors ignore or deny evidence of the root issues that lead to such shocking material and social divides.

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Pursuing the NYPD’s Panopticon

During New York’s wild real estate boom, nearly every brownstone in Harlem seemed slated for renovation. So when the NYPD introduced its latest surveillance technology, Sky Watch — a mobile, collapsable prison-style surveillance tower equipped with at least half a dozen cameras — it was a foregone conclusion that its deployments to locales like 129th and Lenox Avenue were harbingers of the gentrification wave, reassurance for paranoid urban prospectors.

After all, military-style security booths had long dotted the darker residential streets of Morningside Heights, reassuring the parents of students at Columbia University and Barnard College that their children were under guard. Still, Sky Watch appeared to take the NYPD’s hired “eyes on the street” to the next level — literally.

Like Bentham’s panopticon, Sky Watch’s intended purpose is to instill discipline, deterring crime where it has spiked. That’s made its recession-era whereabouts a bit surprising.

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Acid Rain

Part of Mongkok’s allure is the feeling you get that it teeters perpetually on the brink of chaos. There’s so much going on — and so much of it hidden away on the upper floors of dilapidated walkups, deep within labyrinthine commercial blocks or halfway down a narrow laneway — that any visitor to the neighbourhood is belittled and disoriented. Like a drug, the loss of control is unsettling yet strangely enticing. Nobody has a grip on what’s really happening in Mongkok; it lives by its own intangible rules.

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Après le déluge

Photo by Lee Celano for the New York Times

Like Venice, it has often been said, New Orleans is sinking. It is sinking literally, of course, into the soft south Louisiana mud from whence it came. Yet it is its social decline that may ultimately render it more akin to the proverbial Pearl of the Adriatic—gutted of local life, of indigenous gestalt, with only the quintessence of its streetscapes left behind, ripe for exploitation by blind capital—and the superficiality of sightseers. Unlike the functioning, workaday trade city, New Orleans’ raison d’etre has never been its industriousness nor even its creativity, but its self-preservation: that of its paradoxically dolorous joie de vivre, yet one that could only be nourished by social distress. And yet the city finds itself at somewhat of an unprecedented crossroads: the point at which cultural survivance has finally been disrupted by a far more crucial need for survival; its life-giving cultural paradox unwound and exposed.

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