It's almost a truism in urbanist circles that construction of urban freeways was a bad idea. Indianapolis Monthly magazine takes a somewhat more charitable view in its retrospective on the 40th anniversary of the completion of the downtown "inner loop" freeway. But even before its grand opening, the inner loop–31 miles of interstate within I-465, built at a cost of nearly $300 million–had begun paying downtown dividends. Real estate values around the superhighway increased in the early 1970s, reversing a 35-year decline, and Mayor Hudnut … [Read more...]
Archives for October 2016
Corporate Mustard Showroom Helps Explain New York’s Retail Rent Crisis
The story of skyrocketing rents has two components: residential and commercial. My New York neighborhood, the Upper West Side, features fairly stable residential rents, but commercial rents seem to have been soaring. This has caused the familiar angst over the loss of neighborhood businesses to the ubiquitous bank branches and drug stores. But today even chains are getting priced out. The quintessential marker of gentrification, Starbucks, was recently forced to relocate in my neighborhood. They vacated their stores at 67th and Columbus … [Read more...]
William H. Whyte’s Original Plan to Save Bryant Park
William H. "Holly" Whyte, the former Fortune magazine editor best known in urban circles for his classic book The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, famously did a report on Bryant Park in the 1970s that was ultimately used as a basis for transforming what was then known as "Needle Park." Andrew Manshel used to work for Bryant Park Corporation, the entity that actually did transform and still runs the park. (If you get a chance to see Bryant Park Corp. CEO Dan Biederman give a talk, be sure to take it). He now runs an excellent web site on … [Read more...]
The Rival Future Visions of Peter Thiel and Scott Adams
Our mental model of the world shapes our behavior at fundamental levels in ways we often can't even recognize. I was struck by this when reading two books almost back to back, Scott Adams' How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big and Peter Thiel's Zero to One. Both authors lay out a schema for modeling the future and how to behave relative to it, but come to very different conclusions. Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, has a simple model: systems over goals. That is, it's better to have a good system with high … [Read more...]
The Places Where We Work
Gary Hustwit is a New York based filmmaker known for his various documentaries on design, including Helvetica, Objectified, Urbanized, and a forthcoming documentary on legendary Braun designer Dieter Rams (a project I backed on Kickstarter). I really liked Helvetica, which told the story of typography through the lens of that ubiquitous font. Objectified I have not seen, but I did see Urbanized and gave it a pretty tough review. Hustwit's current project is a film called Workplace about the design of the office. This is a bit of an … [Read more...]
Carnegie Deli and Other Bad New York Restaurants
When you're a kid, there are certain cartoons you just love. That love remains over time as your warmly think back on childhood memories. It lasts, that is, until you foolishly go back and watch an episode of two of a favorite show, what which point you say, "Holy cow! That show is terrible." I was thinking of this as I read the surprisingly large press that greeted the news that New York's Carnegie Deli will be closing. It even made the front page of the Financial Times print edition this weekend. About 10 or 15 years ago I decided to … [Read more...]