This isn’t the first time I’ve covered a sublease within a gym or health club, hereafter referred to as a “physical fitness marketplace”. A few years ago, I noted how a physical therapy clinic had moved into a space within a larger health club—a glassed-in chamber that previously served as a racquetball court. This time,
Malls across the country, large and small, urban and suburban, enclosed and open-air, are dying. They’re getting sucked into a vortex of shifting consumption patterns that rejects what we might call peripatetic shopping. The image of an attractive woman clothing multiple large paper bags is increasingly passé. People shop while seated at their home computers,
Biking along the Great Allegheny Passage (GAP) in the final days of summer yielded some unexpected opportunities for leaf-peeping. The GAP, a massive rail-trail conversion linking downtown Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Maryland, allows uninterrupted bike/pedestrian access from the Steel City to Washington DC, by means of a transfer onto the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal Towpath
Seen a flick at a single-screen theater lately? Ever seen a movie at a single-screen theater at all? Odds are strong—for any American over the age of 35 who grew up an urban cluster (basically any community over 5,000 people, per the Census’s revised definition—the answer is probably “no”. Some very remote small towns have
Several weeks ago I featured the borough of Wilson, Pennsylvania—a small municipality in the Lehigh Valley region, where Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton are the most prominent cities. Wilson is adjacent to Easton and in most respects is culturally indistinct: at a certain point it incorporated as a separate municipality, but it shares Easton’s street grid,
A few lifetimes ago, when I lived in the northern suburbs of Chicago (the “North Shore”) I would routinely drive along Golf Road, an east-west arterial linking the city of Evanston (where they called it Emerson Street) and the seemingly never-ending concatenation of suburbs to the west. Continuing westward, Golf Road eventually terminates in Elgin,
In 2024, a rail-trail conversion is hardly a novel concept. The likelihood that most Americans have never walked or jogged on one says more about our sedentary lifestyles than the trails’ scarcity. In fact, rail-trail conversions exist in all 50 states and continue to grow in both quantity and total mileage. Initially a tactic for
I usually wait more than a few weeks before I offer a follow-up from an earlier post. But if I learn something new almost immediately after posting—sometimes as a direct byproduct of the initial article—then I’m more than happy to revisit the subject, offering new insights or corrections as necessary. More often than not, the
Far be it from me to turn into a crotchety old killjoy who lambastes every pocket park I find, but I already did it once a few years ago, for a tidy but neglected little mini-playground in Alexandria, Virginia. Since a bigger, higher-profile, and splashier (literally) play area stands just a few blocks away, my
Glenwood Springs, Colorado is a fun town. That’s its brand. It aspires to be one of America’s most recreationally-minded small municipalities—really more of a tiny city—and it routinely makes the top 10 lists among various outdoor-centric periodicals, as I covered once before. Sometimes it reaches a bit further, placing on lists of all-around best and
This isn’t the first time I’ve covered a sublease within a gym or health club, hereafter referred to as a “physical fitness marketplace”. A few years ago, I noted how a physical therapy
Malls across the country, large and small, urban and suburban, enclosed and open-air, are dying. They’re getting sucked into a vortex of shifting consumption patterns that rejects what we might call peripatetic shopping.
Biking along the Great Allegheny Passage (GAP) in the final days of summer yielded some unexpected opportunities for leaf-peeping. The GAP, a massive rail-trail conversion linking downtown Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Maryland, allows uninterrupted
Seen a flick at a single-screen theater lately? Ever seen a movie at a single-screen theater at all? Odds are strong—for any American over the age of 35 who grew up an urban
Several weeks ago I featured the borough of Wilson, Pennsylvania—a small municipality in the Lehigh Valley region, where Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton are the most prominent cities. Wilson is adjacent to Easton and
A few lifetimes ago, when I lived in the northern suburbs of Chicago (the “North Shore”) I would routinely drive along Golf Road, an east-west arterial linking the city of Evanston (where they
In 2024, a rail-trail conversion is hardly a novel concept. The likelihood that most Americans have never walked or jogged on one says more about our sedentary lifestyles than the trails’ scarcity. In
I usually wait more than a few weeks before I offer a follow-up from an earlier post. But if I learn something new almost immediately after posting—sometimes as a direct byproduct of the
Far be it from me to turn into a crotchety old killjoy who lambastes every pocket park I find, but I already did it once a few years ago, for a tidy but
Glenwood Springs, Colorado is a fun town. That’s its brand. It aspires to be one of America’s most recreationally-minded small municipalities—really more of a tiny city—and it routinely makes the top 10 lists