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32 articles

Crown Hill’s slippery steep slope: better just to close it off altogether?

My home city of Indianapolis is not, in most respects, a city of great topographic variation.  This should not come as a surprise to anyone who has either spent time in Indiana or who forms conclusions about the Hoosier State from its representation in popular culture.  It’s a state of primarily fertile land.  Corn.  Soybeans. 

Area of Refuge in upstate New York: more than just shelter from a six-month snow season.

I generally try to avoid two consecutive posts in the same state, but I can’t help myself this time around.  And frankly, the location—the geography, the jurisdiction—isn’t really all that significant.  Though these images come from upstate New York (as the title indicates), the issues that they raise could just as easily be anywhere in

College Park: the Maryland uni town where retail should thrive. And doesn’t.

By this point, after two years of intermittent lockdowns and the ensuing impacts on businesses, we can all see it with our own eyes: retail is fickle.  I’ve written about this more times than I can count, since the very onset of this blog, waaaaay back when the biggest issue I could see was that

White stripes: in this context, the drums may be the most essential part.

It’s amazing the world of difference that a few stripes of paint can make.  Thirty years ago, the notion that various municipal public works departments would overtly reserve portions of our roads as exclusive lanes for bicycles was essentially an extravagance—a weird provision relegated to a few choice roads in college towns, which were the

The old utility-pole-in-the-sidewalk predicament: do we have clearance…Clarence?

I’ve written as a guest contributor at the blog Urban Indy numerous times in the past.  Although the blog is currently only marginally active, and I personally have not dabbled in the topic, other contributors have bemoaned the fact that pedestrian improvements in the very auto-centric city of Indianapolis rarely extend to persons with disabilities,

Eagleridge Shopping Center: rockstar parking…in strip mall suburbia?

Salvaging the subject of strip mall soulfulness for a second study, I present a regional shopping center of no great distinction.  Much like the suburban structures of the previous article, Eagleridge Shopping Center is unusually coy about its name; the massive sign facing Interstate 25 forces the title to the absolute bottom.  Most people probably

Fort Worth Water Gardens: when a splashy downtown feature rests on a slippery slope (literally).

Let’s face it: it doesn’t matter how big or vibrant your city’s downtown is.  Generally speaking, the civic plazas immediately outside the major municipal buildings are dead on weekends.  There just isn’t any magnetism, given that these buildings host city government functions, which typically operate during regular business hours, Monday through Friday.  (Emergency and corrections

Chipotle bucks the struggling restaurant trend, by predicting the future. What’s so tricky about that?!

A year ago, the prevailing wisdom among urban analysts was that restaurants would serve as the lodestar for any further downtown revitalization.  I shared this sentiment, particularly in recognizing the recent, fashionable emergence of the food hall–a smattering of diverse small-kitchen eateries under one roof.  The reality seemed, then as now, that most other retail—certainly