I was briefly back on the homefront earlier this month to check out the now fully opened Big Four Bridge pedestrian path across the Ohio River in Louisville. While there I spent some time in NuLu, a retail and restaurant district centered on Market St. just east of downtown, and had dinner at a French bistro type place called La Coop. This place focuses on what I'd call the basics - it's not trying to be a super high end kind of place. But I'm not going to lie, the undistinguished frites aside, the meal was spectacular front to back, and my … [Read more...]
Dallas: A City in Transition
Dallas Skyline. Source: WikipediaI was in Dallas this past week for the New Cities Summit, so it's a good time to post an update on the city. I don't think many of us realize the scale to which Sunbelt mega-boomtowns like Dallas have grown. The Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area is now the fourth largest in the United States with 6.8 million people, and it continues to pile on people and jobs at a fiendish clip. Many urbanists are not fans of DFW, and it's easy to understand why. But I think it's unfair to judge the quality of a city without … [Read more...]
Columbus, Know Thyself
After my "Checking In On Columbus" post last week I was surprised that quite a number of people in Columbus, though a minority, took great exception to it and posted a number of negative comments about the post and me. I had thought it was a mostly positive take and I'm long on record has being bullish about the city and its future. I asked someone I knew there about this and he suggested that Columbus had a history of insecurity, highlighting an incident a while back in which, upon visiting a fantastic Japanese restaurant in a suburban … [Read more...]
On the Riverfront
Thursday I took a look at my "Cincinnati conundrum," namely how it's possible for a city that has the greatest collection of civic assets of any city its size in America to underperform demographically and economically. In that piece I called out the sprawl angle. But today I want to take a different look at it by panning back the lens to see Cincinnati as simply one example of the river city. There are four major cities laid out on an east-west corridor along the Ohio River: Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis (which is not on … [Read more...]
Sunday Night Dinner in Indianapolis
Sunday night dinner in Herron-Morton Place, Indianapolis. This is one of three dinner groups in that neighborhood. Photo by Amanda Reynolds (check out the mirror!)Urban culture varies radically from city to city. Yet to a great extent the culture of the usual suspects type of places tends to get portrayed as normative. In New York, for example, with its tiny apartments, the social life is often in public, in many cases literally on the streets of the city, which pulse with energy. As the ne plus ultra of cities, the street life of New York is … [Read more...]
The Promise and the Peril of Rust Belt Chic
What do you do when you're a post-industrial city fallen on hard times? There's a sort of default answer in the marketplace that I'll call for want of a better term the "Standard Model." The Standard Model more or less tells cities to try to be more like Portland. That is, focus on things like local food, bicycles, public transit, the arts, New Urbanist type real estate development, upscale shopping, microbreweries, coffee shops, etc., etc. The idea seems to be that the Rust Belt city model is a failure and should be chucked in favor of … [Read more...]
Will Las Vegas’ Downtown Project Succeed?
This is the second installment in my look at the Las Vegas Downtown Project. In part one I gave an overview of the project and some of the positives and success indicators. On Thursday I looked at some of the commonalities between Vegas and other small cities as a bridge to this installment. And finally today I want to look at some of the challenges I see with the Downtown Project and ask, will it succeed? As for the answer to that question, some of it is a matter of how you define success. At a base level, there's already been success. … [Read more...]
The Inevitability of Community in Small Cities
This is both a standalone piece and a bit of a bridge between the first installment in my Las Vegas Downtown Project overview and the second one. One thing I consistently heard from the people in Vegas was their pride about the sense of community they had downtown. Tony Hsieh says it is the most community oriented place he's lived. One of the Downtown Project official goals is to make Las Vegas the most community-oriented downtown in the world. There's certainly a big sense of community in downtown Las Vegas. I don't want to diminish that … [Read more...]
Tony Hsieh and the Las Vegas Downtown Project
The Downtown Project in Las Vegas, an attempt to completely reinvent downtown Las Vegas spearheaded by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, is one of the better known downtown revitalization initiatives in America. I've been planning to write on it since I saw Tony speak about it in Providence last fall. I was kicked in the pants to finally do so by a trip I took to Vegas last week to check the Downtown Project out. Before going any further, I should disclose that I stayed there for free in one of the project's "crash pad" apartments (more on those … [Read more...]
Parallel Societies
This post originally ran on November 11, 2009. Until recently I had an apartment in the Fountain Square neighborhood of Indianapolis. Fountain Square is a small commercial node surrounded by houses on the near southeast side of the city that has long been my favorite 'hood in the city. I've been hanging out in the area for over 15 years. Fountain Square was a sort of lower working class neighborhood. The South Side of Indianapolis is notably more Southern in character than the north. In fact, some have said that Washington St. (or I-70) … [Read more...]
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