Next Week This Morning
A preview of this week's slate of Christmas specials
Readers: this Saturday’s post is unlocked, because for this coming week, I’m doing my annual slate of Christmas special pieces along with offering a discount for new subscribers! So I don’t want anyone to subscribe at full price today.
The discount runs until the end of Sunday the 22nd, and each of this coming week’s pieces are longer and more fleshed out than what I typically publish. It’s a fun thing to publish these longer pieces, and I’m very thankful to you that I have a large enough audience to publish them here instead of trying to freelance them to a magazine.
“The Deleted Scenes” originally, in my mind, referred to the idea that this newsletter would be expanded or leftover bits of my other writing, a kind of “here’s the stuff that got cut or that didn’t fit or that is interesting and adjacent to a recent piece but doesn’t quite make a piece on its own.”
I do a lot of that, but what I do here has evolved to the point where sometimes I run those magazine-type pieces here, and often ideas I end up writing up into feature pieces begin here as conversational pieces that help me flesh out an idea with you. It’s a fun process, and it makes writing something we all do together, in a way. So thank you!
And now I’m going to give you a rundown of the pieces coming this week.
Monday is my first stab at a question I’ve been thinking about for awhile: which settlement in the United States could you plausibly describe as the last traditional urban place ever built here? In other words, not a New Urbanist project or a modern “town square” development or something, but the last time in the 20th century that the traditional town-planning pattern was enacted before the status quo shifted to suburban, car-oriented design principles. My answer may not be the answer, but it is probably one of them. I’m going to keep thinking about this.
Tuesday is a piece adjacent to housing and economics and my generation’s complicated attitudes about family formation and having kids. This is one that I started over two years ago and never quite finished until now. What I do in this piece is try to put into words what I sense in general from people my age. And I think what can appear to be hostility to or dislike of children is in a lot of ways just a kind of emotional path dependency; most of us do whatever feels like the default or easiest thing, and that used to be getting married, buying a home, and starting a family. That chain has been broken, and even for those people who want those things, achieving them takes an affirmative effort that it didn’t used to. I think this applies to American attitudes about cities and urbanism, too: most of us have never truly lived in a city, and, as I wrote recently, it is very easy to mistake liking what you know for knowing what you like.
For this week’s “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?”, I look at the history of a regional supermarket chain from the midcentury years in southeastern Virginia. It’s striking how “modern” a lot of retail concepts back then were, and how long it took for similar concepts to become mainstream again. (You see some of this in a piece I wrote about the history of “supercenters.”) If you like quirky retail history, you’ll like this one.
For Thursday, I’m writing about my first visit to New York City since 2015, how I had sort of forgotten what a genuine big city feels like, and how I liked it a lot more than I remember liking it back when I was younger and had no particular interest in cities and urbanism. What I really took away from this visit was that the things people say about cities, and the experience of being there in the middle of a city, are wildly divergent. Yes, there are problems in cities, not the least of which is crime. But cities are incredible, quirky, diverse, energetic places full of all sorts of things. There’s a real value in putting down your thoughts and ideas and narratives, and just experiencing being in the middle of it all.
Friday’s New and Old roundup is a typical roundup of four pieces, but the pieces themselves are especially noteworthy in my view, and I’ve written longer engagements with them as well. Enjoy a little reading around the web.
Enjoy the whole week, and have a wonderful Advent and Christmas and holiday season. Thank you for reading!
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I lived in New York for 11 years, from 1968 through 1982. You know why New York is addictive? It's a video game before there were video games. Of course, you can retreat to your apartment and hopefully find as much silence and solitude as you need, but as long as you are on the street there is always something going on, something that needs to be evaluated, something that needs to be understood. This experience is provided absolutely free of charge and in unlimited quantities.
My favorite New York street moment of those 11 years is when I saw a riderless runaway police horse galloping down 45th St headed toward 10th Ave. The horse was a thoroughbred type, and probably not the best choice for police work. I knew if the horse got to 10th Ave there was almost certain to be a horrific accident. Worried, I took a couple of steps into the street, but the horse just swerved away from me. [I must point out that I have enough background with horses that I know that none of them will deliberately run into a human being. Horses actually have to be trained to joust, an activity that runs against their instincts.]
Then, out of nowhere came a yellow cab driving 45 miles an hour down the street. It passed the horse and swerved to a screeching halt in front of it. The horse reared up and fell on its ass. Quite frankly I don't remember what happened next, but the horse never got to 10th Avenue.
It was the best piece of driving I have ever seen in real life.
I've always been fascinated by the opposite end of that question, early examples of intentional planning. I grew up in the other Manhattan, founded in 1855. The original plat included Market Squares every few blocks, basically strip malls. The Market Squares were never used and eventually those blocks were converted to ordinary two rows with an alley. A few strip districts later evolved naturally, such as Aggieville next to K-State.
http://polistrasmill.blogspot.com/2012/10/market-squares.html