New and Old #204
Friday roundup and commentary
I Opened A Grocery Store, A Newsletter, Alison Roman, February 2, 2024
Last September I opened a tiny grocery store in upstate New York. It’s called First Bloom. The town it’s in (Bloomville) is small, though the county (Delaware County) is medium—the lovely communities of Bovina, Delhi, Andes, Stamford are all a part of it, if those ring a bell. The building was home to a very good, very popular, very beloved pizza restaurant called Table on Ten. When people ask where the store is, usually all I have to say is “it’s in the old Table on Ten space” and people of a certain age familiar with upstate (weekends or otherwise) go “ahhhhhhhh, yes.”
It seems that everything has to have a concept these days and so here is mine: You need groceries to make dinner (or any meal, really) and so we supply them. That’s it.
Everything is old new again. It’s so cool to see a hyperlocal way of doing of business bubbling up or holding on long after the rest of the business world has left it behind. There are very few of this sort of place left anywhere I’ve ever lived.
This tiny little town doesn’t strictly need a grocery store—there are two modern chain supermarkets 15-20 minutes away. But that’s not nothing, and only a very small-scale operation can sustain itself by serving just the people of one very small town.
Roman writes:
While I cringe at the word, I guess you could say it’s “curated,” though only because it’s pretty small. There isn’t a ton of space to carry ingredients I think are superfluous or, worse, things that might be popular but maybe don’t taste that good (to me, anyway). Yes, this is my curated grocery store and I’m drunk with power.
That’s the thing about very small businesses: they have some character to them, which means they might not be for everyone, but that they’re particular in ways bland chain establishments just really can’t be.
It’s funny; Roman sounds like a quirky, hippie-ish person (at least from this piece) and sometimes that doesn’t play well in stuffy little old towns. But the fact is, the people who actually start these little shops that play an important role in local economies often are a little eccentric, and I think most places would be better off with a few more folks like that.
Yes, a comprehensive plan can be ‘Lean’, CNU Public Square, Robert Steuteville, February 23, 2022
In the planning field, a comprehensive plan often takes 30 years to update, and is usually anything but lean. As the name suggests, it covers everything about a city or town’s future goals for community development, land use, and more.
Nevertheless, the Project for Lean Urbanism, an off-shoot of the New Urbanism movement, has taken that concept seriously in its Lean Comp Plan Tool. Appropriately, the word “comprehensive” was shortened in the title, because everything about this document is concise.
There’s something here like “When you try to do everything you do nothing” or “don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.” It’s a bit of a wonky piece, so here’s the TLDR:
Perhaps the leanest comprehensive plan is one that directly leads to implementation, and doesn’t just sit on a shelf.
How Much Traffic is Cruising for Parking?, Transfers Magazine, Robert Hampshire and Donald Shoup, Fall 2019
Cruising for parking stems from underpriced curb spaces. If prices are too low and no curb spaces are vacant, drivers searching for parking congest traffic, waste fuel, and pollute the air. Conversely, if prices are too high and many curb spaces are vacant, businesses lose customers, employees lose jobs, and cities lose tax revenue. Consequently, pricing for curb parking should follow the Goldilocks principle. The right price is the lowest price that keeps one or two spaces open for convenient access on every block so that any driver willing to pay will find a place to park.
That’s the economics. The psychology is that car dependence makes places feel artificially full. Partly because we think of too many cars as “overcrowding,” without perceiving that the issue is basically the geometry of cars themselves.
This is also a wonky piece which attempts to actually measure how much urban traffic is just people looking for spaces, which is part of the pricing equation.
Modern Slipcovers, What Are Streets For Newsletter, BNJD, February 25, 2025
This is a fun piece that shares one of my “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?” newsletters on a building in Enid, Oklahoma, and offers some examples of old buildings with later slipcovers in Houston, where the author is based.
I call modern facades placed over old ones “reskinning,” which is a video-game term, but “slipcover” is better because, as it implies, the original “skin” is still under the new one, typically. Apparently that’s what architects call it.
You can go through a lot of old towns and find 1970s, old-fashioned modern slipcovers over what are usually really old-fashioned two- or three-story urban buildings. The slipcovers often cover up the upper windows, which is consistent with those floors often falling out of use. I don’t have an example I can recall, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen examples of the 1970s-era slipcovers being removed and the original facade being restored. Which is almost always nicer.
Related Reading:
Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 1,200 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this!