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164 articles

A construction staging area and a sidewalk: never a healthy pairing, but sometimes the treatment is worse than the disease.

November 7, 2019 No Comments

For most of the 21st century, and certainly in the last ten years (since the Great Depression) the majority of American downtowns have enjoyed a reinvestment no longer measured merely in spruced-up old façades. The cranes, dozers and other construction equipment are all the evidence one needs. People are returning to central business districts, in

The pocket park: does a mega city need a mini playground?

August 26, 2019 10 Comments

The caliber of playground amenities in our urban parks has improved and diversified considerably in recent years. I can remember when I was a child: it was typical for each piece of equipment to sit in isolation, almost forcing the kids to decide between playing with one another or engaging with the equipment and making

Crystal City surprises: a 1970s-era Edge City engulfs a streetcar suburb.

July 30, 2019 10 Comments

By this point, it is all but common knowledge that metro Washington, DC will greet the second headquarters for Amazon.com, the world’s largest soup-to-nuts Internet-based company. Less familiar, though, is its exact location, in an area called Crystal City, a mixed-use enclave directly across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital, in Arlington County, Virginia.

What will Washington DC do with all its triangular parcels?

June 30, 2019 2 Comments

In a quiet, mostly residential neighborhood in northern Washington DC, less than a half-mile from the Maryland border, a modest bit of new construction yields a subtle surprise.It doesn’t look like much, and, in most respects, it isn’t. Just a big new house, presumably multifamily (I’m guessing between two and four units), though maybe it’s

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

If you can’t remove the room with a view, build anew.

August 7, 2018 2 Comments

A thriving neighborhood in the nation’s (and one of the world’s) most densely populated cities should yield great promise. This is New York City we’re talking about, and, in any given hour, at just about every intersection, hundreds—even thousands—of people walk or drive by. And the high concentration of rooftops, housing units, office leases, and

The restaurant scene of Columbia Heights: in here, it’s always Tuesday.

July 30, 2018 16 Comments

This post serves more as a prelude to a forthcoming, lengthier rumination on retail conditions in Columbia Heights, a Washington DC neighborhood I have explored multiple times in the past.It is among the oldest “suburbs” platted outside of the original l’Enfant plan for the capital region. I apply quotes to the word “suburb” because, though it