Street Cleaning Vol 2: Trucks, Landmark Stores, Concrete Anteater.

Sometimes your brain is a swirl of half-ideas that don’t form into a coherent thought, so here is a newsletter of odds and ends.

I wrote something not on Substack

I wrote an Op-Ed for Streetsblog about two of my favorite topics, bland cities and throwing parties in public. It’s a very NYC-centric article but I think the point is pretty universal - in an era of globalized supply chains and cheap materials, all our cities are slowly looking more and more like each other. The antidote to this is better design (duh) but more to the point it’s better programming — parties, events, and everyday activities that express neighborhood character and get neighborhood people to use their spaces like one big living room.

On that point… Today is TOUCH A TRUCK DAY.

Activating public space is complicated… except when it’s not.

The Plan: Park a variety of trucks and large vehicles on a closed street and let children go ape-shit climbing all over them. That’s the general idea behind Touch a Truck Day put on by the Myrtle Ave Business Improvement District in Brooklyn. This year there was no fire truck but the FDNY made up for it by bringing small plastic fireman hats and giving them out.

The award for creativity goes to the local moving company that brought out one of its vans and set up a giant play area made out of moving materials.

Kids, like cats, really enjoy sitting in boxes. Think about this next time you buy your child an expensive toy. The guys from the moving company however looked deeply concerned.

Somehow the most popular vehicle was this Park’s Dept lawnmower.

Our Department of Transportation showed up this year. The tent on FREIGHT MOBILITY was not particularly popular with the kids, but the peppy staffers had more luck getting toddlers to engage with some basic street safety education.

Sorry, these pictures aren’t very good but I was a childless adult wandering around a kid’s event with my phone out so I didn’t want to linger too long. Anyway, the whole thing was a great example of the kind of experiences we can create when we treat the roadway as a flexible public space. All the better that the main draw was the type of vehicle that usually clogs these very streets, spewing fumes and menacing the children who were now happily treating them like jungle gyms.

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Should your favorite store be a landmark?

I’ve been thinking a lot about stores since I read not one, but two articles about David Barnett, the founder of the New York City Sign Museum, a nonprofit that “rescues historic advertising throughout the boroughs.” The museum emerged from Barnett’s nostalgia for the brush-painted and neon signs of his youth. I got a bit of a shock when the New Yorker described Barnett dismantling the sign for an old-school Italian restaurant called Queen not far from Brooklyn Borough Hall. I had no idea Queen had gone out of business. I’d be lying if I said I was a regular (a friend of mine got instant food poisoning there from squid ink pasta), but it was the kind of place you liked to know was still open, where waiters in jackets glided around with veal Milanese and sang to you if it was your birthday. And even if you didn’t go in, you could enjoy its impossibly large neon sign. Gothamist also profiled Barnett and showed him rescuing the sign outside J & R Television and Air Conditioning, a storefront I must have passed thousands of times growing up nearby.

Behind the sign-nostalgia is the extreme fragility of urban retail. It seems like every day some sort of beloved business closes. Recently it was Crest Hardware in Williamsburg, earlier it was Nearys. Urban land has become such an asset that it feels almost divorced from reality on the ground. You can have lots of foot traffic and sales and still be expected to pay insane rent in a city that’s scaling back services and crime is (maybe not really?) on the rise. The whole thing got me thinking… Should we have some sort of landmark program for legacy businesses? Some quick googling led me to the Small Business Anti-Displacement Network, which lists programs and policies used around the country to keep long-time businesses in place. I found out for example that Washington DC has a grant program for businesses that have been open more than 25 years and want to pay for capital improvements to their stores. I also already knew that in Paris, the metropolitan government owns almost 20% of all storefronts and leases them to businesses it deems culturally relevant (yes, a lot of cheese shops, but also a Feminist bookstore!) at low cost. I may do a full post in the future looking into this. On one hand, it seems insane to me that a store can be successful by almost every metric and still be forced to close by a rent increase. On the other hand, is it fair to enshrine certain businesses in protective amber? Even if they’re beloved?

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I’ve got some stuff coming up

My lack of productivity on Substack is partially because I’m hustling to finish a project I’ve been working on for a community group in South London which I’m excited to tell you all about. I’m also starting a new job for the NYC municipal government working on their outdoor dining program. Have any thoughts about outdoor dining in your city or here in NYC? What’s working, what’s not, what you hate, and what you love? Send it my way! I want an iteration of Street Snacks to cover al fresco dining around the world.

Nerd Corner

Here are two city and design things that got my attention off Substack.

• Graham McKay is an architect and lecturer who has maintained an amazing little blog of criticism and thinking for many years. I recently started reading him again after an unintentional hiatus and it’s mind-expanding. His old posts on Streets in the Sky and the slow divorcing of craftsmanship from architectural education are two favorites.

• The Verso Podcast recently had a discussion about the late Mike Davis. Davis is the kind of writer I wish I was, effortlessly blending hardcore research, observation, theory, and criticism to explain cities and places. As someone who is bewildered by LA, reading City of Quartz was a formative experience for me.

Urban Animal Update

I wrote a post on the animal motifs that decorate NYC playgrounds and used it to make a wider point about ornamentation and urban design. There was a particularly eccentric NYC Parks commissioner in the 1980s who required all new playgrounds to have animal decorations, including a menagerie of concrete critters that kids could climb on. These animals are now pushing 40 years old, and I figured that once they left they’d never come back. In the post, I mentioned a concrete Anteater that’s parked in a school playground not far from my apartment. When the playground closed recently for renovation I was sure he would be sent to the Retirement Home for Playground Animals (this is a real thing)… but no! A recent site visit confirms that the Anteater is staying, and it looks like he even got a buff.

Finally… Thanks for reading

This is still a small Substack in absolute terms, but coming up on a year I feel like I’ve found a little corner of the internet to elevate my own and your consciousness about planning issues and weird city phenomena. Growth has been steady, read rates are high, and many of you have reached out directly to let me know you appreciated a certain post or to tell me about something you saw (or point out a spelling mistake). I truly appreciate it.