The search "waterfronts" yielded
19 articles

Outside the Outer Banks of North Carolina: can OBX energy spread to the Inner Banks?

The letters “OBX” adorn many a back bumper, at least among vehicles in the eastern half of the country, particularly concentrated among the states along the Eastern Seaboard.  (And typically cares at the level of Volvos and Subarus…or pricier.)  It’s safe for me to wager that most people in these eastern states—loosely equating to the

Bicycle boulevard in a crunchy college community (Ithaca)—and good at getting over gorges.

Bicycle boulevard: it’s not just another alliteration that’s fun to say (as they usually are).  It’s a topic for which aficionados have more answers than there are people asking the questions, which I recognize isn’t exactly a selling point .  But since this isn’t always a blog for dilettantes, i’ll posit those questions nonetheless.  What

Classical music and crime prevention: 7-Eleven is just the start.

Several weeks ago I noted what I believe is a misbegotten campaign loosely branded “hostile design”, which seeks to galvanize criticism toward the now-ubiquitous effort of preventing people from getting too comfortable in shared public spaces—so comfortable it constitutes (in some people’s option) outright abuse of that shared civic trust.  We’ve all seen examples: carefully

Directional arrows in excess: the squires’ turf wars cause serfs’ confusion.

“Too many cooks…”  It was an aphorism decades before it became a cult short film–maybe even centuries.  We all know how it ends.  And we can all think of examples.  After thirteen years at the helm of this blog (American Dirt is finally a teenager!), I had to use my website’s own search function to

Hoboken NJ: gentrification in a time-lapse overdrive, but without all the improvements.

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

Cycle tracks in small towns: North Beach, Maryland has one, but does it really work?

Do you remember the good old days of bicycle advocacy, back when the prevailing ambition was the introduction of bike lanes, buy applying solid stripes on the pavement?  If you’re older than twenty, you probably should remember those days; they weren’t that long ago.  As recently as the mid-2000s, the standard for bike-friendliness was bike

Fort Worth Water Gardens: when a splashy downtown feature rests on a slippery slope (literally).

Let’s face it: it doesn’t matter how big or vibrant your city’s downtown is.  Generally speaking, the civic plazas immediately outside the major municipal buildings are dead on weekends.  There just isn’t any magnetism, given that these buildings host city government functions, which typically operate during regular business hours, Monday through Friday.  (Emergency and corrections