Street Stack: Street Cleaning

Bits and Bobs

Last weekend’s post was the 20th post of Street Stack. In my short time on this platform, my least favorite type of content has been Substacks about Substack, so I’ll keep this brief. There is also funny stuff at the end.

Where I’m at:

When I started I set a modest target for myself of 30 subscribers. Thanks to you, I’ve exceeded that many, many times (I apologize to all of you who followed me through

Emilia Petrarca

and

Anna Z Gray

and thought you were getting something shopping-related.) My audience is still smallish, but my read rate is high and the response people have been sending me has been so encouraging.

My favorite posts have been about looking for my grandfather’s gravesite and the NYC tradition of the fire-hydrant-sprinkler-party. My most read post (by a lot) was on the retail apocalypse and reimaging ground-floor vacancies.

I thought I’d run out of things to say, but 20 posts make me confident this is something I can continue. Frankly, it’s been fun, and the challenges of planning and city life are an endless well of ideas. That said, I’m not a writer, as you can probably tell from the copious typos and grammatical errors in my posts (sorry… but also whatever). These posts take me a considerable amount of time to write, and I’d like to do even more.

Where I’d like to go:

I’m committed to maintaining a robust amount of free content. A big reason I started this newsletter was that I felt like there was no mainstream planning media, and I didn’t want to put up more barriers to making sense of an already opaque field. That said, if you’ve enjoyed this project so far, I would appreciate an upgrade to paid.

Paid subscriptions will allow me to justify the time it takes to write, supplement what I’m sure will be a relatively meager salary as a bureaucrat, soften the crushing debt of grad school, and fund my extravagant urban lifestyle!

Here are some ways I’d like to grow

• Interviews: I’ve been lucky to meet some really interesting people across work and school — architects, planners, non-profit leaders, community organizers, and more — who I’d love to show you.

• Planning Sprints: In the spirit of my quick proposal for a COVID memorial, I think it would be fun to start a series of planning sprints. I’d pick a site (or maybe they’d be submitted) for improvement and do a down-and-dirty plan to address an issue. Maybe I’d invite other professionals to help, or even contribute a planning sprint of their own. These would be highly visual, with sketches and diagrams.

• Issue Guidance: I’m a local politics junkie. I keep an eye on the mayors of pretty much every major city in America (and now I can’t help myself with London), and reflexively assess the progress of urban issues I care about— whose cleaning their river, who is creating the highest quality affordable housing (or any affordable housing), who is successfully mitigating climate change. If you’ve followed me on Instagram, you know I have a lot of opinions on local elections. I’m not going to make this a politics newsletter, but I’d like to have some more issue-focused content that lets people know what the landscape is like for a given topic.

• Subscriber-directed content: Have an issue or topic you want me to look into? Send it my way.

You can upgrade to paid for $5 a month, or for a little discount you can do $55 for a whole year. Click the button below to go to the plans page.

Or you can give it as a gift!

Enough groveling, here’s some funny pictures

I’ve only been to Chicago once and I loved it so much, mainly for its hot-dog-centric streetscape. Look at this weirdo.

Six months later I was in Paris. I gasped when I saw this, what’s the connection? Who lives in this Parisian apartment???

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Recently the NYPD dance team went viral for a meh TV performance. My hot take as a police budget skeptic is that workplaces should be allowed to have extracurriculars, even if they’re cops. I bet the dance team is cheaper than some of the other first-responder excesses I see around NYC.

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Following up on my longstanding obsession with urban signs… here are some good ones.

Here was a sign-related one-upmanship that seemed to be going on between two street vendors in Soho NYC last summer.

And finally, this made me smile.