To continue the thought from a post last week, a lot of people noticed that city centers were improved – in horrible circumstances – by the reduction in car traffic during the Covid-19 lockdowns this spring. It’s inevitable that people will look for a silver lining in this enormous cloud, but beyond that we need …
Visitors to New York are often surprised to find out how easy it is to get lost. It’s a big city, but everyone knows we have a numbered grid, so how hard can it be to find your way around? There are several problems, starting with the fact that New York’s numbered grid was something …
Last fall, I wrote a very short and somewhat glib blog post on Seneca Village. It’s a topic that deserves better treatment, so here we go. Seneca Village was a small community, from the 1830s to the 1850s, located on Manhattan island well to the north of the built-up portion of New York City. It …
When you focus on buildings, as I usually do, it’s easy to overlook the spaces between them. They seem like a mere negative, the places where buildings are not, but that’s absolutely wrong. Public spaces are where part of the daily life of a city plays out, and how those spaces are designed, how they …
Sometimes I’ll read several articles in a row that seem logically connected. Perhaps the current conditions of enforced isolation and poor economics conditions have encouraged writers to move in the same direction, or perhaps there really is a deep connection between the following pieces: “Could a Public Works Program Save New York City’s Economy?” by Samar …
