The term itself doesn’t usually require much explanation, even if most people have never used the it in everyday conversation. They automatically know what a food desert is. For those who don’t, it takes very little to conceptualize: if a person lives in an urbanized area—and most Americans do—odds are good that he or she
It sure seems like the Mid Atlantic states have more than their fair share of Giant supermarkets. No, I’m not talking about anything on the scale of the one I blogged about in Fairbanks, Alaska a few years ago; that was a Fred Meyer (now a subsidiary of Kroger, the nation’s largest grocery chain), and
It’s hard to imagine any American town of a certain size—small enough that most would still consider it just a town, but big enough that it probably fits the political classification of a city—that doesn’t have, or at least had, an old storefront movie theater as part of its main street. Everyone knows the type:
The earth has revolved around the sun quite a few times since I patronized a restaurant called Kokopelli’s, a little boutique burrito joint on an obscure intersection near Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans, which did not re-open after Hurricane Katrina. (Yep, that long.) Time has relegated this hapless sole proprietorship to such obscurity that there’s
I’ve featured more derelict malls and shopping centers than the average reader can shake a selfie stick at. (An apt reference, since the oldest chroniclers of struggling retail—the sites DeadMalls.com and LabelScar.com—haven’t received updates since the popularization of the selfie stick. But they were great sites when I first started blogging!) As far as depressed
Urban planning, like most disciplines, endures its fair share of fads and passing fancies, many of which the advocates manage to elevate to temporary orthodoxy. And if “temporary orthodoxy” seems like an oxymoron, it shouldn’t require a great deal of introspection to realize that many orthodoxies remain doctrinaire for about a decade. And then they
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
The term itself doesn’t usually require much explanation, even if most people have never used the it in everyday conversation. They automatically know what a food desert is. For those who don’t, it
It sure seems like the Mid Atlantic states have more than their fair share of Giant supermarkets. No, I’m not talking about anything on the scale of the one I blogged about in
It’s hard to imagine any American town of a certain size—small enough that most would still consider it just a town, but big enough that it probably fits the political classification of a
The earth has revolved around the sun quite a few times since I patronized a restaurant called Kokopelli’s, a little boutique burrito joint on an obscure intersection near Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans,
I’ve featured more derelict malls and shopping centers than the average reader can shake a selfie stick at. (An apt reference, since the oldest chroniclers of struggling retail—the sites DeadMalls.com and LabelScar.com—haven’t received
Urban planning, like most disciplines, endures its fair share of fads and passing fancies, many of which the advocates manage to elevate to temporary orthodoxy. And if “temporary orthodoxy” seems like an oxymoron,
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