Street Stack

The next Street Stack walking tour will be in NYC this September. Details to come, but space will be more limited this time, and paid subscribers will get priority. It’s never too late to upgrade and help fund the large amount of time and effort I put into Street Stack. When I was in grad school, I took a rudimentary class on visualizations. Below is an image I created for the unit meant to familiarize us with the Adobe Suite. I imagined a market made up of shade parasols that look like mushrooms.

The next Street Stack walking tour will be in NYC this September. Details to come, but space will be more limited this time, and paid subscribers will get priority. It’s never too late to upgrade and help fund the large amount of time and effort I put into Street Stack. I regret to say I’ve failed you all. Despite this being a Substack about urban planning, I’ve never discussed in detail an actual capital “P” urban plan.

For the past couple of years, I’ve floated the idea of going on a jet ski tour around New York Harbor for my birthday. This idea is inevitably shot down by friends, who are squeamish about being sprayed, possibly in the mouth, by East River water. But two factors had me staring longingly at the thin band of grey water visible from my apartment last week— a skin-melting heatwave and a massive parade of tall ships on New York’s rivers for the country’s 250th birthday.

A lot of photos in this one so view in your browser or the app as the email may be cut-off. I swear this is not strictly speaking another Knicks post, but our starting point is the Knicks’ championship parade last week, a parade that a little less than 1/4 of the city’s population was estimated to attend, and the only time I’ve felt genuinely unsafe in a crowd.

In this time of tech hyperbole, it’s trite to call something a “platform,” but a good city really is a platform. The building blocks of the city —the sidewalks, the intersections, the fire escapes, the physical and social fabric— should be flexible enough to knit and unknit itself to meet different moments.

Planning vignettes from my travels and guest words on pubs and sandwiches Lots of pictures in this one, so the email may be cut off. Read on a browser or in the Substack app for the best experience. I’ve just returned from the gurgling streams and spongy mountain passes of County Kerry, Ireland. But this isn’t Field Stack, so I’ll touch on Dublin, which I found eminently walkable, beautifully detailed, and dripping with history.

Because I’m on vacation, and because the Knicks are once again (!!!!) in the Eastern Conference Finals, I’m reissuing this post I wrote during last year’s playoff run. Hopefully this year turns out better. Photo by Walter Iooss Jr. Has something ever made you so happy that you’re embarrassed? To swing emotionally by how five grown men play with a ball is not something to be proud of.

Street Cleaning is the monthly feature of quick takes, links, and nonsense. Have something interesting you think I should share? Send it my way! A huge thank you to everyone who came in the rain to my little tour of the Brooklyn waterfront. Hopefully, you’re now armed with facts to bore people with at dinner parties, unless you’re at dinner with me, then we can talk. Twenty-five of you spent a Saturday learning about marine worms, the BQE, and the definition of “rip rap,” and I truly appreciate it.

Spirit Halloween is a chain retailer that operates hundreds of seasonal costume stores across America. True to their theme, these stores tend to haunt derelict property. In 2021, Spirit caused a stir when it temporarily occupied the abandoned Barney’s department store, which had recently declared bankruptcy, filling the former temple to cutting-edge fashion with wigs and sexy SpongeBob SquarePants costumes.

There are a couple of places in NYC so overwhelmingly majestic that they temporarily melt your problems away. I’ve always thought the Brooklyn Waterfront looking towards Manhattan was such a place, the kind of place that makes you throw your arms up, turn to the person next to yo,u and say, “one day, all this will be ours!” So I’m happy to announce that Street Stack’s first IRL event will be along a lovely, dare I say, iconic portion of the coast as we do a brief but impactful walking tour.