This is probably beating a dead horse: it’s Sears article. Again. I’ve featured the declining department store many times on the blog; back in the early 2010s, it was still a ubiquitous presence in American malls. And I last covered Sears just six months ago, when I found an operating store in Francis Scott Key
“Don’t be so humble. You’re not that great.” ~Golda Meir Ever come across a business that seemed to go out of its way to hide its presence? One that didn’t announce itself prominently from its front entrance, but instead seemed to downplay its own name, its logo, its fundamental identity? It’s hard to understand why
If First Lutheran Church, the subject of my previous blog post, seemed like familiar territory, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Here the once-mighty retailer Sears Roebuck and Company—AKA Sears—for at least the tenth time. I first started featuring this retailer over a decade ago, back when Sears was a staple in most middle-tier malls. Even
Hoboken, New Jersey isn’t a particularly obscure suburb. Peering right across the Hudson River toward Greenwich Village, it’s a fortuitously located municipality that basically everyone in metro New York knows. Odds are good that most adults living in the tri-state area have passed through it at one point in time. Tiny though it may
Amidst the broader cultural polarization and the ensuing moral panics (or perhaps the moral panics that have prompted the cultural polarization?), we’ve witnessed far more people announcing their political loyalties than in the past, often through overt displays in their front yards. While one can find these sort of signs just about anywhere in the
As a successor to my post on a bumper sticker bedecked guardrail in Wilmington, I offer a second example of what I must at least partly attribute to meme culture, for which the World Wide Web exerted little to no influence. This second example of memetic behavior that is anti-digital is probably a bit more
Having recently achieved a trip to my fiftieth state (forty-ninth admitted to the union), I can say with a fairly high degree of confidence that one state surpasses all the others at having developed and maintained a consistent brand. I’ll confess that it’s been many, many years since I visited Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Utah, South
Of all the keywords used to organize my blog posts by topic, the number one by far is “signage”. The keyword (under my menu bar “Topics”) yields 193 separate articles. Given the aspirations of this blog, it’s a hard subject to avoid: one of the key elements of a human-conceived, built environment is that critical,
It’s rare that a major effort in environmental engineering, no matter how noble the intent or how solicitous the conception, yields absolutely no negative environmental consequences. It’s probably more than rare. I’d wager that such a feat has never occurred. It’s all the more unsettling when one considers such vast civil undertakings as the canal
McConnellsburg, a borough in south-central Pennsylvania with a population noted as not much over 1,000, has managed to find a way to monetize parking in its downtown—that is, the three blocks that comprise its main street (Lincoln Way). Do you see them there in the distance, next to the sidewalk? The village hosts a tidy
This is probably beating a dead horse: it’s Sears article. Again. I’ve featured the declining department store many times on the blog; back in the early 2010s, it was still a ubiquitous presence
“Don’t be so humble. You’re not that great.” ~Golda Meir Ever come across a business that seemed to go out of its way to hide its presence? One that didn’t announce itself prominently
If First Lutheran Church, the subject of my previous blog post, seemed like familiar territory, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Here the once-mighty retailer Sears Roebuck and Company—AKA Sears—for at least the tenth
Hoboken, New Jersey isn’t a particularly obscure suburb. Peering right across the Hudson River toward Greenwich Village, it’s a fortuitously located municipality that basically everyone in metro New York knows. Odds are good
Amidst the broader cultural polarization and the ensuing moral panics (or perhaps the moral panics that have prompted the cultural polarization?), we’ve witnessed far more people announcing their political loyalties than in the
As a successor to my post on a bumper sticker bedecked guardrail in Wilmington, I offer a second example of what I must at least partly attribute to meme culture, for which the
Having recently achieved a trip to my fiftieth state (forty-ninth admitted to the union), I can say with a fairly high degree of confidence that one state surpasses all the others at having
Of all the keywords used to organize my blog posts by topic, the number one by far is “signage”. The keyword (under my menu bar “Topics”) yields 193 separate articles. Given the aspirations
It’s rare that a major effort in environmental engineering, no matter how noble the intent or how solicitous the conception, yields absolutely no negative environmental consequences. It’s probably more than rare. I’d wager
McConnellsburg, a borough in south-central Pennsylvania with a population noted as not much over 1,000, has managed to find a way to monetize parking in its downtown—that is, the three blocks that comprise