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Inbound LGA, Prospect Park

 Photos by Davina Pardo

From Lip King to Her Knotty Corner

Many of you will have seen this, but: some punny cartography of the Toronto subway system (whose real map is here), inspired by a similar stunt in London. This sort of affectionate appropriation seems to get transit managers all huffy.

Radical Cartography

From Jason Kottke's "Manhattan Elsewhere" page, an act of "radical catography," seen while contemplating NY vs SF.  
 

Robert Moses Week

It's Robert Moses week in New York, and it's all a bit overwhelming. In the audience-- the overflow audience-- at the Museum of the City of New York last night, I couldn't have been the only one uncomfortable with the simultaneous thrill of Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff's vision for the future of the city, thanks to a new age of master-building, butting up against the terror of Majora Carter's scathing, heart-wrenching plea for democratic, sustainable, non-racist city building. And there's Moses' legacy, as complex and contradictory as the city itself.

Setting aside the snazzy Plazes map, that's me at the end of the arrow.

You Are Here

The most basic premise of this blog is that we're writing about places in the non-place of the web; its most basic conceit is that doing that somehow makes the web less of a non-place and more of a place. Because we're human. (After all.)

I don't know what Plazes does to all that, but I definitely like it. Can we all do it? I think it'll work to have a little individual map for each of us down the right side of the page. Here's how to do it: register, track your location, then click on "share location" and "integrate your map in your blog." Set the size to 200 x 200, choose your colors, then email me the html that shows up in the box. (I don't think you can get into the "typelist" with your "guest author" privileges. The one catch is that I think everyone's map will say "I AM AT..." -- but then it's all about collective identity, right?

Green Urbanity

My story about the green Toronto offices of HOK-- one of the largest architecture firms in the world-- is up on the Metropolis site. The Torontonians in the group will enjoy it, but I'm more excited about the fact that the concept of what makes interior design 'green' was extended to the urbanity of the office, not just its fixtures-- particularly given the fact the project was chosen as part of the International Interior Design Association's/ Metropolis Smart Environments Awards program. Here's the urban analysis:

The location is at Toronto’s hipster heart, near both the boutique-lined stretches of the King West neighborhood and the clubs of the Entertainment District. “I hate to call it gentrification because it’s still got a nice edge to it,” Stratford, who lives in the suburbs, explains a bit sheepishly. Two streetcar lines intersect outside the door—worth a single LEED point, one of 36 toward a Gold rating for commercial interiors—and the regional commuter rail is within walking distance. A recent office survey shows that 82 percent of the employees who live in the city said they either take public transit, walk, or bicycle to work; 67 percent of employees living in the suburbs use public transit. Bike parking and showers are available in the building—earning another LEED point. As in many design firms, a sense of urbanity is embedded in HOK’s culture; with this space the firm was able to embody the feeling in its office. “We’re thinking about the community of people who work in our studio and how we can design a great space for them, but we’re also in a location that really feels like a part of the broader community we live in,” Stratford says.

Photo for Metropolis by Christopher Wahl. And make sure to check out the infographic on the office's commuting patterns.

Catalogues, not the holiday kind

I've been reading Nicole Krauss's novel The History of Love, which has made me want to re-read Italo Calvino's dream Invisible Cities, which only primed me for the one-two of these articles-- about Russian airports and boring towns in the Maritimes-- both owing something to the master. 

First, Calvino:

Diomira: The special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman's voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time. 

Then Edward Riche writing in The Walrus:

Cranstock cannot even assert that it is the most boring town in New Brunswick, a title held for many, many, many years (too many to bother counting) by Addleby, the historical museum of which displays a copy of the 1968 phone book, the last year a separate edition was issued for the county. Frestover, Nova Scotia, situated at the mouth of the turbid, sluggish, and meandering Western River, on the featureless Northern Shore, was long considered one of the most uninteresting places in all of Canada, let alone the Atlantic provinces, until, in 2001, a fair-sized sinkhole appeared near the municipal boundary and a hobby farmer nearby acquired a llama.

Finally, an apparently un-bylined article in The Economist

Irkutsk: Five hours ahead of Moscow, in eastern Siberia, Irkutsk is the nearest city to Lake Baikal, the world's largest body of fresh water—water so clear that it induces vertigo in many of its visitors. The drive to the lake leads through vast forests, past the roadside shamanistic altars of the indigenous Buryats, under an enormous Siberian sky. In the 19th century Irkutsk was home to many of the so-called Decembrists, and the wives who followed them into exile after their 1825 revolt against the tsar: men and events that might have changed Russia's history, and the world's. Alexander Kolchak, a diehard White commander, was shot in Irkutsk in 1920; his body was thrown into the icy Angara river.

Planes descend into the city's airport over identikit Soviet apartment blocks and rickety Siberian dachas. The current arrivals terminal is a hut on the apron of the tarmac. Passengers wait in the street until the baggage-handlers feel inclined to pass their bags through a hole in the hut's wall. The bags then circulate on a terrifying metal device apparently borrowed from a medieval torture chamber. The nearby departure terminal is chaos, though by ascending an obscure staircase passengers can find an interesting photographic display on “minerals of eastern Siberia”.

The hut, however, is only temporary: a new, modern terminal is being built. It will be needed if the local authorities attract all the tourists they are hoping for. Lake Baikal, the awesomely beautiful main draw, was threatened by a new oil pipeline—until Vladimir Putin ordered its route moved away from the shores of what Buryats call the “Sacred Sea”.