For the small handful of people who are this blog’s devotees, the image below may be a tiny bit familiar. I’ve covered this small subdivision in New Albany, Indiana once before. The name is Pickwick Commons, an age-restricted townhome development in which the retirement-age residents retain (at most) a small garden plot to cultivate, but
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
I’ve written as a guest contributor at the blog Urban Indy numerous times in the past. Although the blog is currently only marginally active, and I personally have not dabbled in the topic, other contributors have bemoaned the fact that pedestrian improvements in the very auto-centric city of Indianapolis rarely extend to persons with disabilities,
Early in the summer, on an evening run in a little-used park along the west bank of the Anacostia River loosely referred to as the Navy Yard Channel, I encountered a hazard that would be bad enough during the daytime. In the darkness of night, in a meagerly lit area, it was even worse. Can’t
To celebrate the spooky season just a little bit on the late side, I’ll abstain from references to zombies, werewolves, or blood-thirsty vampires. That’s the stuff of Hollywood. I’ll hold off from massive jack-o’-lanterns, witches crashing into buildings, enormous spiders, or the arched backs of black cats. Those seem to be the status quo for
Sure it’s weird, but I know I’m not the only one who has romanticized oil refineries. The way their size generates its own skyline, their incompatibility with the natural world, their unparalleled aptitude at point-source pollution: air, soil, light, probably noise. We witness the staggering cruelty to the dilemma that forms the basis for their
A trip to the Dallas Metroplex last fall helped acquaint me with a characteristic to Texas street subdivision design that I had never noticed before: the unusual prevalence of the back alley, even in housing built within the last 25 years. While it’s possible this never struck me in the past because it’s a Dallas
While almost all urban aficionados have heralded the revitalization we have witnessed in downtowns large and small across the country, the sticklers and control freaks among us have continued to cavil about one nagging shortcoming: the form of mixed-use and multifamily projects has disproportionately favored big lots with monolithic structures that, while certainly better than
A bizarre piece of infrastructure like this will inevitably captivate a few more curiosity seekers than yours truly. As a Google Images search would prove, I’m not the first to snap a pic of something like this. Still, a fire hydrant elevated about 18 inches off the ground is hardly a typical sight even in
The climate of the American high plains may not be completely desert-like, but the similarities are uncanny: relatively little rain or moisture in the air, a temperature that plunges at night throughout the year, considerable variation between summer and winter, but fiercely hot in the former. Many of these characteristics incidentally bespeak high altitudes more
For the small handful of people who are this blog’s devotees, the image below may be a tiny bit familiar. I’ve covered this small subdivision in New Albany, Indiana once before. The name
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
I’ve written as a guest contributor at the blog Urban Indy numerous times in the past. Although the blog is currently only marginally active, and I personally have not dabbled in the topic,
Early in the summer, on an evening run in a little-used park along the west bank of the Anacostia River loosely referred to as the Navy Yard Channel, I encountered a hazard that
To celebrate the spooky season just a little bit on the late side, I’ll abstain from references to zombies, werewolves, or blood-thirsty vampires. That’s the stuff of Hollywood. I’ll hold off from massive
Sure it’s weird, but I know I’m not the only one who has romanticized oil refineries. The way their size generates its own skyline, their incompatibility with the natural world, their unparalleled aptitude
A trip to the Dallas Metroplex last fall helped acquaint me with a characteristic to Texas street subdivision design that I had never noticed before: the unusual prevalence of the back alley, even
While almost all urban aficionados have heralded the revitalization we have witnessed in downtowns large and small across the country, the sticklers and control freaks among us have continued to cavil about one
A bizarre piece of infrastructure like this will inevitably captivate a few more curiosity seekers than yours truly. As a Google Images search would prove, I’m not the first to snap a pic
The climate of the American high plains may not be completely desert-like, but the similarities are uncanny: relatively little rain or moisture in the air, a temperature that plunges at night throughout the