Brand Avenue

Place Porn

I used to seriously entertain the idea of moving. This was back when I was less encumbered and traveled quite a bit. Every trip wound up as an audition for my New Hometown. Within a few days, I’d have decided which house would be mine, picked out which coffee shop I’d frequent, relished the thought of how much cheaper and easier it would be than living in New York City. The classic New York narrative is one of strivers drawn to the city by their ambition to be artists, Broadway sensations, contortionists, or what have you. I, on the other hand, live here essentially because my parents did, just as their parents did before them. Back then, it still seemed I might be able to break that chain. I came really close to moving a few times. But since having children and settling into a home in Brooklyn a block from where my father was born, I’ve pretty much given up the dream. Uprooting seems impossible, except when I visit the land of fantasy relocation.

Though my forays to this land are furtive and infrequent, I know I’m not the only visitor. Indeed, there is a whole genre of magazine feature that caters to moving-obsessed people like myself, providing lists that tell us which cities in America are offering everything in life we currently lack.

via www.good.is

Sound familiar?

The Road to Exurbia

Western Massachusetts does not resemble the metastasizing landscapes we’ve come to recognize over the last decade, the frenzy of bulldozers and stoplights, the clusters of KB Home or Toll Brothers signs pointing toward levees outside Sacramento or into hardwood copses north of Raleigh, the subdivisions tamped into Florida citrus groves. The history of my dad’s town, and perhaps more importantly, its ethos, the communal imagination of what it means to live there, sets it apart from the kind of exurb you might see in the national news.

Or at least, that’s what I would like to think. Yet if I take a closer look at the town in light of the Brookings criteria, I’m hard pressed to argue with the report. Most of the people I know commute to work. Housing is low-density: during the last speculative real estate boom-and-bust, in the 1980s, the town voted to create a two-acre minimum lot size. And it doesn’t take much development to create high population growth in a small rural town. Recently, one person who’d purchased land when it was cheap decided to retire elsewhere, carving the wooded property into parcels with road frontage. Realtor signs hash-marked the roadside, and now dirt driveways appear at regular intervals along a stretch of road that had been woods. Not the same in density or scale as a swath of new housing outside Dallas, but a subdivision just the same.

via places.designobserver.com

Rural New England functions a lot more as suburbia than it might appear at first glance.

The Scent of Departure

Much like a landmark, it seems that a smell can distinguish one city from another.

New fragrances capturing the “essence and spirit” of destinations have hit the airport duty free shelves, promising tourists lingering memories of their trip abroad.

The Scent of Departure collection was launched in April with five perfumes inspired by the cities of Frankfurt, Budapest, Vienna, Munich and Istanbul.

The brand capitalises on the ability of scents to evoke vivid, tangible memories of a certain place.

Each city scent is sold exclusively in the duty free airport stores of the cities they symbolise, in a cool glass bottle featuring the airport’s three-letter code on a boarding-pass tag.

By spritzing on Vienna – or “VIE” as it is universally known by a three letter airport code –holidaymakers are taken back to “the peaceful Danube banks full of enchanting scents of mint, cut grass and water flowers”, as well as “the gourmand scents of Wien’s pastries, with their notes of vanilla, liquorice, chocolate and coffee.”

via www.terminalu.com

To me, the Boston scent would allude to both salt air and the smell of the Downtown Crossing T.

PGH, the White

It would be hard for any metropolitan area to be whiter than Pittsburgh.

It's so hard, in fact, that of the 100 largest metro areas in the United States, only one has a smaller share of blacks, Hispanics and Asians -- the Scranton-Wilkes Barre region of northeastern Pennsylvania.

A new Brookings Institution report released last week, examining 2010 census data on how Americans identified race and ethnicity, found that southwestern Pennsylvania is whiter even than the Amish country around Lancaster, the Mormon population center of Salt Lake City, Midwest agrarian capitals such as Des Moines, Iowa, and far more isolated places like Boise, Idaho.

It is not stunningly new data for this former melting pot -- findings from the 2000 census were much the same -- but what might be eye-opening is that the pace of change toward greater diversity is even slower here than for all those places above, as well as the rest of America.

via www.post-gazette.com

Meanwhile, my relatively cosmopolitan hometown is the eighth least diverse of all cities in the survey.

231st Street Builds Its Future

Kingsbridge has long been home to an ethnically diverse cross section of middle- and working-class residents. Now developers of two new condo buildings are trying to attract more affluent families to the area from northern Manhattan and beyond. One selling point for West Kingsbridge is its proximity to Riverdale, a wealthier Bronx community on the Hudson River.

While West 231st is just two subway stops from Manhattan on the No. 1 train, getting potential residents to cross the border into the Bronx has always been difficult. But developers say that affordable prices—along with quiet streets and an abundance of private, parochial and charter schools—is helping them overcome the negative perceptions of the Bronx.

"We're trying to tell people that if they stay on the subway for another 10 minutes, they can save hundreds of thousands of dollars and have lower taxes and live in a doorman building," said Rutherford Thompson, a managing director at Jackson Capital Partners Corp., the sales and leasing agent for Sycamore Court, a 63-unit building that opened recently at the corner of 231st and Corlear Avenue.

Watch the Bronx change before your eyes.