David Prowler Blog

You’ve probably heard of Bilbao, Spain.

If you have, it is because of the Guggenheim Museum:

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Not really because of the Museum, but because of the building, designed by Frank Gehry and built in 1997. It really put Bilbao on the map. Philip Johnson called it “the greatest building of our time” and the NY Times critic Herbert Muschamp called it “the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe”.

There aren’t that many other buildings that are such icons of their cities. 

I don’t need to tell you where these are:

(Photo credits: Saffron Blaze, Dietmar Rabich, Wikimedia Commons)

I can’t even think of Cairo, Sydney, or Pisa without imagining these buildings. 

Other cities have icons, but that isn’t all they are known for. There are lots of reasons to go to Paris or New York or San Francisco besides the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, or the Golden Gate Bridge.

But if you go to Bilbao, it is for the Guggenheim. In 2025, there were 1.4 million hotel bookings in the city – and 1.3 million people visited the Museum.

Bilbao was in serious decline when the City decided to invite the Guggenheim. Global shipbuilding had shifted to Asia, steel demand fell, the mines closed, and the old industrial infrastructure became obsolete. Unemployment climbed to 25%, the estuary was heavily polluted from decades of industrial use, and large swaths of riverside land, including the area where the Guggenheim now sits, were derelict shipyards and warehouses.

The Basque conflict compounded the sense of crisis. In fact just 5 days before King Juan Carlos I inaugurated the Museum, Basque separatists shot and killed a policeman who interrupted them setting up a grenade launcher aimed at the building.

It was a tough time for the city but they decided to double down on architecture.  Santiago Calatrava was hired to design a new airport and a bridge.  Norman Foster designed the metro system:

Álvaro Siza designed a university building, Robert Stern designed a shopping mall, and Philippe Starck converted a wine warehouse into a cultural center:

Zaha Hadid was brought in to do a master plan for a former industrial zone.

The museum is a significant economic force.

In 2025, under new director, Miren Arzalluz, the Guggenheim recorded 1,305,003 visitors and an economic impact of €782 million, supporting over 14,000 jobs. (The previous director went to prison for skimming some of that economic impact.)

This patronage costs a lot of money, and the city invested when funds were scarce. To attract the Guggenheim, the city paid $100 million for construction, a $20 million licensing fee, a $50 million art acquisition fee, and an annual operating subsidy. This at a time of economic and political crisis. I really admire the leadership of Bilbao for making such a bold gamble.

The result is called “the Bilbao Effect”, an urban turnaround triggered by investment in an iconic building or cultural center. Herbert Muschamp, writing in the New York Times, called it “The Miracle in Bilbao”.

Sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn’t.  The Louvre Lens didn’t do much for that city.  And when cities compete with stellar buildings it’s good for starchitects but the miracle gets diluted. Sometimes it isn’t even needed. 

Look at Porto, Portugal. The city population of 249,000 is smaller than Bilbao’s 346,000 but the metropolitan population is about the same. 6.2 million tourists visited Porto in 2025, about 4 times Bilbao’s – without significant investment.

OK, so maybe the Guggenheim isn’t strictly necessary.

But it’s wonderful.

And it makes us reimagine what a building can be.

And that’s what culture is for.

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David Prowler was Planning Commissioner and Director of Economic Development for the City of San Francisco. He recently published A Telegram From Marcel Duchamp https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GTFLR5R9?lv=shuf&language=he&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

Visitors to Paris’ Passage des Panoramas might be puzzled as they pass the storefront that used to house the stamp collector store Panoramas Philatélie.

The shelves in the window used to showcase stamps. Then the shop closed and the stamps were replaced by cobwebs.

I walk by every few days because I love the Passages, covered streets of shops and restaurants. This one, Passage des Panoramas, is the oldest remaining Passage in the city, dating to 1799.

It sat like that for about a year, surrounded by packed restaurants, cafes, and the specialty of the Passage: postcards.

Everything around it is thriving.

During the day and especially during the summer and around the holidays it is packed.

The restaurants, stamp stores, the gay sauna (that seems to attract a geriatric clientele and closes at 8 – so they can get home to their families I suppose), the wax museum – all jumping.

The potential haunted me.

I wanted to show some art in the window.

At that moment I happened to have a show of my art up, in another Passage, Passage Ste. Anne:

So I wrote a note in French and slipped it through the mail slot. I said I’m a neighbor and I’d like to clean the window and show some art, short or long term as convenient. I wrote that I would not need a key and that I would be happy to discuss a little rent.

But I have lived in Paris long enough to not expect much, even a reply. A few days later I passed through the Passage and I was surprised to see the letter gone.

Tossed, I assumed.

But then my phone rang.

It was the owner of the storefront. Raphaël lives upstairs with his kids and he told me he wasn’t “contre l’idée” and about an hour later we sat down for coffee and the deal was done:  free use of the window for as long as I like and he wasn’t even so interested in what I wanted to show. 

Which was good because I had no idea.

This was a Wednesday and by Saturday we were cleaning the window and on Sunday Pierre, Raphaël and I put the show up.

I already had the work. I went with the surrounding postcard theme and showed the set of Surrealist postcards I had done last year, in a signed and numbered edition of 100. You can see most of them in my previous post https://davidprowler.blog/2023/11/20/the-most-surrealist-spot-in-paris/.

With them, on a little easel, I put a set of used Metro tickets that over time I had picked up from the sidewalk.

 They’re in a gold frame. And look precious, like the postcards and postage stamps in the surrounding windows. Maybe they will become precious: Metro cards were discontinued a few months ago.

I had asked the framer to frame them like the diploma of a shady lawyer in a small city and he hit the mark.

I am very happy with this show. It isn’t a store or a gallery: nothing is for sale. And you can’t even go inside. It is open from 6 AM to midnight seven days a week and there is no explanatory text. I hope it helps people to see the beauty in commonplace scraps like used Metro tickets and the everyday Surrealism all around us.

I like the postcards and the Metro tickets, but what I like the most is the whole thing, this mysterious window in the middle of commerce. The art isn’t the postcards and the metro tickets; it’s the shop and the Passage and even the puzzled passersby.

And every few days I pass by and I spend an extra minute looking at people stopping to enjoy Panoramas Philatélie.

San Francisco Chronicle:

Open Forum: A San Franciscan dreams of Des Moines

By David Prowler Aug. 9, 2019

How can you tell whether a city is successful? Here’s a litmus test: Poor people, rich people and people in between can comfortably live there together. It’s a low bar, but since the birth of cities, it’s been one of their strong points.

Nobody would say San Francisco passes that test. Schoolteachers can’t afford to live here. Neither can dishwashers, artists, writers, laborers or retirees. Unless you have lots of money, San Francisco just isn’t inviting. It doesn’t work for everybody, and we are all poorer for it.

San Francisco may be a Great City, but I don’t consider it a successful city.

I’ve had Des Moines, Iowa, in the back of my mind for some time, ever since I read a piece by the musician David Byrne, formerly of the Talking Heads. He tours a lot and posts on his website about cities (and especially bicycles). Of a 2014 stop in Iowa’s capital, he wrote:

I didn’t sense the huge disparity of income that we often see — famously in the town I live in [New York]. You don’t get the feeling you’re an intruder in a rich person’s playground. I saw folks of different races and folks with different backgrounds enjoying their city — rather than keeping to themselves, isolated, as I have witnessed in many other places. I saw neighborhoods that seemed to be holding their own; a middle class was surviving and many were staying more or less close to the city center, which helped it stay alive and vital. I saw the beginnings of local culture manifesting in some new local restaurants, venues, galleries and shops.

I remember when San Francisco was like that. In 1974, I was a college dropout, a dishwasher in the Haight with a studio apartment. I always had pocket money, and I was part of a creative community of painters, musicians and writers.

All kinds of people can live in Des Moines. You don’t have to be rich. And because of that, it can sustain the creative scene that attracted Byrne in the first place (for the opening of the Des Moines Social Club, “a restaurant, bar, theater, outdoor performance space, classrooms and even a culinary school”). It’s a fairly diverse city,13% Latino, 11% African American — about twice the figure in San Francisco — and 6% Asian American.

With an unemployment rate near 2%, you could probably get a decent job there. And it would likely pay enough to live there: The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Des Moines, about $800, is comfortably affordable to a household earning about $32,000 a year, according to a recent study by Apartment List. It takes an income of about $123,000 to afford the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, nearly $3,100.

Des Moines has a river, an art museum, a symphony orchestra, an opera company, lots of insurance companies and a botanical garden with a geodesic dome. It has buildings by starchitects I.M. Pei, Renzo Piano and David Chipperfield. It has a gay bar called the Blazing Saddle.

I imagine the city is flat and surrounded by big farms, and that it’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. People are probably pretty nice, and many of them are probably pudgy.

Des Moines won’t make any list of the World’s Great Cities. It’s no tourist attraction or tech mecca. And it doesn’t make a lot of headlines beyond the presidential primary season.

All I know about Des Moines I learned from the internet. I plan to never, ever visit the city because I prefer to imagine it: the flip side of San Francisco, in a good way – the Des Moines of my dreams.

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The piece got picked up by the Des Moines Register: “Though Prowler promised to never soil his dream of Des Moines observing it up close, he has received an open invitation to visit at any time and claims to be taking it into consideration.”

I started getting emails and tweets from people in Des Moines:  Come visit us.  And after a dinner with a few bottles of wine some buddies and I decided to go.

Here’s what struck me about Des Moines:

It’s not big, just over 200,000 people, which does make it big for Iowa.  It’s not part of a big metropolitan area like I’m used to – once you are out of town you really are out of town, in cornfields with some small developments.

You need a car.  The modern city, especially downtown, was designed to avoid the harsh winter weather and to accommodate cars. But it’s not like LA where you drive for 20 minutes to two hours to get anywhere.  In Des Moines it is a more predictable 10 – 20 minutes.

Then you’ve got to park.

In Downtown Des Moines I saw more places for cars than I’d ever seen anywhere.

Between the highrises and the parking garages most downtown streets are empty and sterile.

Photo:  Des Moines Register

And there really isn’t much reason to be on the sidewalks.  There are hardly any stores or restaurants and you can get around in the 4 miles of glassed-in second story walkways that connect 55 office buildings and their parking garages.

There isn’t even retail along the walkways.  The big employers – insurance companies, banks, and publishing – have cafeterias.  Where would you buy a Band-Aid if you cut your finger? Google Maps lists two drugstores in all of Downtown Des Moines.

There, I sensed the ghost of a former city, with department stores, offices, warehouses, theaters, hotels, all the old-time downtown stuff.

It once looked like this.

By the mid-1980s it looked like this:

In 1987 Downtown had seven blocks of car dealerships.

Meg Malloy, President of the Des Moines Junior League and our super-generous local guide writes:

“It was probably a mix of properties – vacant lots with overgrown weeds and other buildings, some which were dilapidated, but several which were in decent shape but might have been more expensive to bring up to code because of asbestos removal, whathaveyou. A lot of the really cool buildings were (unfortunately) demolished before I was born: the Victoria Hotel, the KRNT Radio Theatre, etc. I suppose nothing is forever where progress is concerned, but it still would have been cool to see Johnny Cash at the Radio Theatre in the 60’s.”

The hollowing out of Downtown wasn’t due to natural disaster, like in San Francisco or redevelopment, also like San Francisco.  Malls and highways killed downtown. Lots of buildings came down, buildings that today would be “historic” and that’s kind of sad.  But if Des Moines had had a more aggressive preservation movement at the time it would be like a lot of American cities, with decaying vacant buildings and high unemployment.  Instead, Des Moines has corporate headquarters and a 2.5% unemployment rate.  (Historic preservation has caught on, after the rehabilitation of a 1913 Masonic Temple into restaurants and a theatre and there are some residential historic districts.) Today both young people and empty nesters are moving back to downtown and the adjacent East Village neighborhood, into conversions and new buildings. In the 1990s 1,000 people lived Downtown: now there are 15,000. And they are happy to have, finally, a grocery store.

There is a lot of buzz about Des Moines, as a place for normal people with normal incomes to rent or buy normal homes and lead their lives.  In recent years Des Moines has been named the nation’s richest (by U.S. News) and economically strongest city (Policom), best for young professionals (Forbes), families (Kiplinger), home renters (Time), businesses and careers (Forbes). It has the highest community pride in the nation, according to a Gallup poll last year, and in October topped a Bloomberg analysis of which cities in the United States were doing the best at attracting millennialsto buy housing.

Nonetheless, despite David Bryne’s impression of integration, it may not be so great for black residents.  We were struck by how few we saw downtown, eating in, or even working in, restaurants and that most people waiting at bus stops for the very few buses were African Americans. Statistics bear out the Des Moines is not a great city for black people.

There’s not much tourism in Des Moines, no double decker buses making loops between sites.  No puzzled French people with maps.  They make an effort and there is a glossy magazine called Catch Des Moines.  Most visitors are from the region.  Without destination landmarks, Des Moines has developed a kind of event tourism.  There is the spectacle of the Iowa Caucus every four years.  But also the Iowa State Fair, Drake Relays, Arts Festival, Opera Festival, 80-35 Music Festival, Hinterlands Music Festival, and this:

The normalcy of Des Moines felt exotic – no Dawn of the Dead streets of drug addicts; no people walking around naked. No cable cars or Statue of Liberty or even an arch like in St Louis – though there is plenty of architecture by its designer, Eero Saarinen and his dad, Eliel.

I really liked Des Moines.  People were super-friendly and proud of their city: “Iowa Nice” they actually call it.  Everyone we met was patriotic about their home and it is the kind of place people move back to. I asked lots of people what’s the biggest problem in Des Moines and the answer was consistent:  potholes.  Not gentrification or homelessness (“There’s some over by 6^th and Walnut.”) or a housing crunch.

Des Moines isn’t packaged for your entertainment.  It’s not a show town like Las Vegas or a Disneyland like those parts of Lisbon that are majority Airbnb or a luxury shopping mall like Soho in NYC.

Des Moines has an authenticity those places lost long ago.  It’s a real place.

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Enormous gratitude to Meg Malloy and Christopher Disbro who invited me and introduced us to both an elegant hushed restaurant and “the best dive bar in Des Moines”, to Evan Olson of Say Hello to the City for his invitation and for showing us around and to Karla Walsh for her insights.Thanks to John Whitty for orienting me before and after.  And thanks to Stinky, the bartender at Blazing Saddle for the round of drinks.

Huge thanks to my buddies Steve Vettel and Rich Hillis for being such great explorers.

 david@prowler.org