To New York, with love
Oh, New York. Before you, I didn’t realize it was possible to be utterly seduced, swept off your feet by a city. I know I’m not the first to declare “I’m smitten!” and I certainly won’t be the last. But like everyone who falls under your spell, I can’t help but feel that our relationship [...]
The history of a city is inscribed in its streets
Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition—hyper-density—without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. -Rem Koolhaas What the Museum of the City of New York lacks in a memorable, rolls off your tongue kind of [...]
The hipster antidote
Tourists don’t get a lot of love from the worker bees who commute to Times Square. The catalogue of complaints is long: They travel in packs at a pace slightly faster than the advance of molten magma. They stop in the middle of intersections without warning to consult a map. They whack you in the [...]
The High Line
Major kudos to Amanda Burden and her team for turning this: into this: The High Line is the epitome of what great design can do, namely transforming what was outdated and neglected (an elevated freight rail line) into something inviting, beautiful, and functional (a public park). Every detail just works, from the blend of rustic [...]
Happy (belated) birthday America! Excuse me while I move in
Oh, the joys of moving. My calves are still feeling it from all the trips to Bed, Bath & Beyond. You would think one of the few upsides of a tiny room is that furnishing it would be pretty straightforward. But setting up a bedroom comes with certain fixed costs, regardless of size, and cramped [...]
Welcome to New York aka bed intruder song remix
It’s so nice to finally be in the city. Really, really nice. All told, it took me 7.5 hours to get from Newark to Brooklyn last night. Yes, seven and a half hours. How in the world did I manage that? It wasn’t easy, let me tell you. 7:00 pm Plane lands exactly on time. [...]
Concrete jungle
Two things stood out to me about my recent trip to New York. The first was the patience afforded my grandmothers, both well into their seventies. I was a bit nervous about how they would fare in the near constant state of freneticism that is the city’s MO. I imagined them being swept away by [...]
