In what is a first for American Dirt—and what I hope not to become a regular occurrence—I offer a tribute to a fellow urbanist and friend. Longtime employee of Philadelphia City Planning Commission and then Philadelphia Streets Department, Anthony Santaniello passed away on October 21st. Anthony wasn’t just a casual follower of the work on
The infamous book How to Lie with Maps initially offered a light-hearted attempt to explore how maps can entice, mislead, inflame, and generally propagandize, often without necessarily depicting anything geographically untruthfully. Juxtapositions (not always to scale), labels, color choice, and infographics can all endow an editorial skew on what seems like objective spatial representation. And
After inadvertently stumbling across some vintage footage of shopping culture from yesteryear, I couldn’t help but ask myself: Is it reasonable, at this point, to compare the revolution in how we consume goods with the old cliché of a boiling frog? How much longer before we the frogs feel the temperature climbing? Using any vintage
The battle has been the stuff of legend in South Philly for half a century. Wedged into two triangular blocks formed through an oblique intersection (East Passyunk Avenue, a beloved corridor I have covered many times on this blog) are two of Philadelphia’s most legendary cheesesteak establishments. They’re so close to one another that it
Poking out over the squat, one-story barbecue joint in the photo above is a relentlessly iterative office building, with not a single variation in its fenestration across all thirty-nine of its upper floors. Windows look the exact same, row after row after row. The only exception is the far left and far right of this
A quick look at the photo above and it should be obvious that something’s afoot at this particular location of Barnes and Noble. Incidentally, I only heavily scrutinized a Barnes and Noble once before, also in Maryland, when I noticed a repositioning of merchandise within the interior just a few months ago. This time, the
It’s rare that I feature two back-to-back articles on the same subject, and even rarer that the subject includes massive, opulent houses. But these houses—each one a castle, or what we would contemporaneously (and pejoratively) call “McMansions”—are the backdrop for what ultimately is an entirely different focal point. Over on Geist Reservoir, in the northeastern
I’m running out of days in this month, and the last few posts took more time than I expected, so I’ll conclude May with a brief hat-tip to one of the greatest unintentional memes that the City of Brotherly Love has to offer, and it gave it to the world long before the concept of
For the book-lovers among us, it’s hard to believe that Borders Books and Music has been defunct now for over ten years. It was one of the first and most obvious high-profile casualties of Amazon, the latter of which nipped away at the revenue stream of what had previously been the nation’s largest bookstore, peaking
There was probably a point in history when virtually every American had heard of Cumberland, Maryland. Not only that, it’s reasonable to surmise that a significant proportion of Americans had passed through it. Aside from the fact that, for most of Maryland’s history, it was the state’s second largest city (its “Queen City” behind Lord/King
In what is a first for American Dirt—and what I hope not to become a regular occurrence—I offer a tribute to a fellow urbanist and friend. Longtime employee of Philadelphia City Planning Commission
The infamous book How to Lie with Maps initially offered a light-hearted attempt to explore how maps can entice, mislead, inflame, and generally propagandize, often without necessarily depicting anything geographically untruthfully. Juxtapositions (not
After inadvertently stumbling across some vintage footage of shopping culture from yesteryear, I couldn’t help but ask myself: Is it reasonable, at this point, to compare the revolution in how we consume goods
The battle has been the stuff of legend in South Philly for half a century. Wedged into two triangular blocks formed through an oblique intersection (East Passyunk Avenue, a beloved corridor I have
Poking out over the squat, one-story barbecue joint in the photo above is a relentlessly iterative office building, with not a single variation in its fenestration across all thirty-nine of its upper floors.
A quick look at the photo above and it should be obvious that something’s afoot at this particular location of Barnes and Noble. Incidentally, I only heavily scrutinized a Barnes and Noble once
It’s rare that I feature two back-to-back articles on the same subject, and even rarer that the subject includes massive, opulent houses. But these houses—each one a castle, or what we would contemporaneously
I’m running out of days in this month, and the last few posts took more time than I expected, so I’ll conclude May with a brief hat-tip to one of the greatest unintentional
For the book-lovers among us, it’s hard to believe that Borders Books and Music has been defunct now for over ten years. It was one of the first and most obvious high-profile casualties
There was probably a point in history when virtually every American had heard of Cumberland, Maryland. Not only that, it’s reasonable to surmise that a significant proportion of Americans had passed through it.
