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74 articles

Microretail in Midtown Manhattan (Part Two): can it salvage the city’s shuttered storefronts?

February 13, 2019 12 Comments

In this era of progressive retail collapse, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to conceive of any viable long-term solution for the numerous, variegated, embattled storefronts across this nation of largely unregulated markets. It’s already bad throughout the suburbs, where strip malls, big boxes, and even formerly mighty regional malls are under such strain from their burgeoning

Tendencies in the Tenderloin, a neighborhood that polarizes.

January 19, 2019 5 Comments

My first blog post in San Francisco is atypical (if anything about this blog topic could ever be considered typical), but it’s probably a significant one given the socioeconomic context. The wealthy core to one of the richest regions in the country—probably among the wealthiest in the world—San Francisco is also the only city I’m

Skid Row in Delaware: if it can claim The First State, it can claim them all.

August 19, 2018 9 Comments

Maybe your first thought, when you see the words in the photo below, is from the hirsute, late-80s metal band. Maybe it’s from the frequent references in the Roger Corman movie and subsequent off-Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors. And maybe it’s the reference to the neighborhood just southeast of the heart of downtown Los

Mid-century Americana: the point when urban housing development really hit a wall.

April 18, 2018 8 Comments

It’s not hard at all to see how housing has evolved over the last century, especially when we visit the residential areas right next to a city center and compare them to the ones a few miles further out in the suburbs. Far more difficult is the distinction between homes from the 1980s and those

From Macy’s to mission work: the Landmark Mall gets a memorable (if not easily marketable) makeover.

February 16, 2018 10 Comments

Several months ago, a humdrum article of mine about a dead mall surprised me because of the response it received. But then, the joke is once again on me: my articles on dead malls nearly always enjoy disproportionate views, hits, and comments. In this case, I honed in on the Sears at Landmark Mall in

Now that we’ve commercialized the facelift, it’s time to domesticate it.

September 10, 2017 6 Comments

Most of us who have spent any time in a city have come across at least one of these before, even if it didn’t necessarily stand out. It’s a building (or cluster of buildings) with an aged façade, concealing a much more contemporary structure behind that wafer-like sheath. The preferred label (morphologically incorrect though it

The Great Recession and its undead discontents.

June 26, 2017 8 Comments

In the immediate years following the housing market’s catastrophic implosion, it was common to find half-finished suburban developments, where a handful of homes splayed out across a tangle of curvilinear streets. In most of these zombie subdivisions, the developer had already installed water/sewer, at least some of the paved roads, streetlights, road signs, maybe even

Chatham Park: a great new development under threat by its own neighbors.

April 27, 2017 No Comments

My latest just went up at Urban Indy. I’ve covered the proposal multiple times in the past. A developer in a downtown Indianapolis neighborhood called Chatham Arch wants to repurpose the site of a long-underutilized old elementary school, occupying an entire block. It currently looks like this: He wants to transform it to this: A mix

Capitol Hill: defining “historic” with a few strokes of a pen on a map…just like everywhere else.

March 17, 2017 7 Comments

Capitol Hill in Washington DC touts itself as one of the nation’s largest and most intact historic districts. Parts of it rest under the shadow of the dome of the U.S. Capitol (at least when the sun is setting), and the entirety of the neighborhood is a quick walk or subway ride to the National

Undone by the dome.

February 19, 2017 9 Comments

Strolling through the town of Bowman, North Dakota last summer (which is how one gets around if one finds oneself in Bowman…obviously), I came across a pretty slick looking geodesic dome home. We see these from time to time. After all, they were quite the fad for a few years, peaking around 1970. While I

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