Street Stack

I’m excited to announce the next Street Stack walking tour will be next week, September 23rd at 6 pm on New York’s iconic Fifth Avenue (rain date September 29). I’m even more excited to be partnering with my good friend Emilia Petrarca aka Shop Rat, on a really nice program supported by the Fifth Avenue Association. The subject of the tour is: What makes a good shopping street?

Recently, a righteous anger has been building inside me. Longtime readers know I spent 8 years working in advertising. Turns out a liberal arts degree in cultural anthropology is suitable training for discovering what makes people tick, and exploiting it. For about one of those years, I aspired to be the sort of ad man who could sell ice in the winter and fire in hell. For the next seven, I increasingly felt that I was working grueling hours doing something dirty. Today, I hate ads.

A lot of photos in this one, so the email will be cut off. Read on the website or in the app for the best experience. The Next Street Stack Walk is THIS MONTH: Announcement coming next week. The room labeled “Conference Room 1A” is exactly what you’d imagine your local bank would feature— drab wall-to-wall carpeting, a drop ceiling, a glass partition separating it from the rest of the floor.

Street Cleaning is the monthly feature of quick takes, links, and nonsense. Have something interesting you think I should share? Send it my way! Seoul: More humid than the Devil’s gym sock. London: brown and dry, might as well be Bakersfield. New York: non-stop schvitz. All the cities in my life are at the brain-fogged end of the hottest summer of all time. I am like a fat sponge waiting to be squeezed out by Fall. In this state, the urge to write about serious urban planning is low.

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.