“Fast food with style.” That’s the motto that I, coming of age in the late 80s and early 90s, associate the most with Rax Roast Beef. But let’s face it: when this formerly thriving restaurant began floundering, the slogans shifted with the seasons. Thirty years later, it’s hard to say which marketing campaign is the
City planners, chambers of commerce, commercial real estate brokers, and Business Improvement District (BID) managers should have no difficulty finding common ground on a number of subjects. Generally speaking, they don’t run out of things to talk about. And while they might cavil about the finer points of what is more important in attracting investment
As the year winds down, I intend to avoid any aphorisms or wisdom accrued over the past year—far too cliché. New Years Day is, after all, a capricious imposition of significance to a 24-hour period that otherwise if fundamentally like any other. Just an arbitrarily agreed-upon point on the elliptical orbit. Why impart words of
The lumpy landscape of eastern Ohio, near the small city of Zanesville, doesn’t offer much in the way of urbanization, certainly not compared to the far more industrialized, flat, western half of the state. So motorists traveling along Interstate 70 must be strategic about where they go to tank up, both their car and their
The previous half of this mega-blog post explored Forest Fair Village pictorially, showing what happens when an investment company is left wringing whatever remaining profit they can derive from an almost completely dead attraction. This mall—98% vacant yet also 98% open to the public—is hardly unique, even by Cincinnati standards, which, like most metros of
My dead mall postings have routinely become some of my most popular articles, and I still have quite a few great spectacles that I could share someday, stored away in my photo archives. (In some cases, the aging photos chronicle a mall in its sunset years that has since closed completely.) I often avoid dead
Although a freestanding municipality, the City of Harrison in far southwest Ohio also functions fully within the orbit of metropolitan Cincinnati. And although the two-block commercial main street appears small for a city of 11,000 and growing, it owes this lack of proportion to the surge of population after 1960, prior to which Harrison lingered
While this article treads across some familiar territory—dead and dying malls—it arrives through a different lens: the eyes of a friend and fellow devotee of interesting landscapes. I blogged many years ago about Sandusky—specifically an unusual Value City Furniture in the heart of downtown—but I spent very little time in the area that one would
It is completely unreasonable for me to use license plate background art as a synecdoche for a state’s prevailing ethos, but I’m going to do it anyway. Why not? The design of a license plate is broadly attempting to achieve this effect, more so than even a flag. Whether license plates originally intended this or
Residential infill development can—and often does—fail to integrate architecturally with the neighborhood that surrounds it. And that’s okay. Far more important than adherence to a certain vernacular is the physical form of the house. When looking at the front of the home square-on, does the layout emphasize a front door, a porch, a garage, or
“Fast food with style.” That’s the motto that I, coming of age in the late 80s and early 90s, associate the most with Rax Roast Beef. But let’s face it: when this formerly
City planners, chambers of commerce, commercial real estate brokers, and Business Improvement District (BID) managers should have no difficulty finding common ground on a number of subjects. Generally speaking, they don’t run out
As the year winds down, I intend to avoid any aphorisms or wisdom accrued over the past year—far too cliché. New Years Day is, after all, a capricious imposition of significance to a
The lumpy landscape of eastern Ohio, near the small city of Zanesville, doesn’t offer much in the way of urbanization, certainly not compared to the far more industrialized, flat, western half of the
The previous half of this mega-blog post explored Forest Fair Village pictorially, showing what happens when an investment company is left wringing whatever remaining profit they can derive from an almost completely dead
My dead mall postings have routinely become some of my most popular articles, and I still have quite a few great spectacles that I could share someday, stored away in my photo archives.
Although a freestanding municipality, the City of Harrison in far southwest Ohio also functions fully within the orbit of metropolitan Cincinnati. And although the two-block commercial main street appears small for a city
While this article treads across some familiar territory—dead and dying malls—it arrives through a different lens: the eyes of a friend and fellow devotee of interesting landscapes. I blogged many years ago about
It is completely unreasonable for me to use license plate background art as a synecdoche for a state’s prevailing ethos, but I’m going to do it anyway. Why not? The design of a
Residential infill development can—and often does—fail to integrate architecturally with the neighborhood that surrounds it. And that’s okay. Far more important than adherence to a certain vernacular is the physical form of the