The Little Poconos Town That Accidentally Got Cool, Philadelphia Magazine, Sarah Zlotnick, November 14, 2020

“With a now-cutthroat real estate market and an influx of city-weary crowds, how long can this charmingly small town stay ... small?” This is similar to the dynamics in Lancaster, Pennsylvania (on which I have a forthcoming piece—stay tuned.) It’s a good question: how do you accommodate growth without ruining what makes the place desirable? For me, being an urbanist means believing that’s possible.

“When you think of somewhere like Honesdale — you know, rural small-town America,” Zlotnick writes, “you probably don’t think of hustle and bustle.” One of my key points is that if you look at our history, these “sleepy,” “quaint,” “charming” small towns were, in fact, bustling, lively places.

Burnt out on the city but too cool for cookie-cutter suburbs, young people are buying old houses out here, trading barre classes for long hikes and $15 avocado toasts for farm-fresh cheese, and breathing new life into the region.

Another important point here is that, while this transformation to upscale localism can seem like it’s own form of cookie-cutterism, it’s really a return of sorts to America’s old small-town economies. They were, in many ways, “all the same.” But it was a sameness that worked at a local scale, and resulted in places we still love today.

Read the whole piece, much of it on the granular history and evolution of this little Pennsylvania town. It’s excellent.

Cincinnati Built a Subway System 100 Years Ago–But Never Used It, Atlas Obscura, Kevin Williams, January 29, 2016

Interstate 75 slices the city of Cincinnati in half like an orange. On one side is the city’s Catholic working class west, while the east side is favored by the wealthier academics and industrials holed up in enclaves with names like Indian Hill. On all sides are cars. Simple commutes from Cincinnati’s suburbs to downtown can take an hour or more. One hundred thousand cars and trucks a day clog both directions on I-75, many of them headed to towns elsewhere in Ohio.

But it was almost a different story. If just a few things had gone differently Cincinnati would today be a city of straphangers and bustling underground stations.

Another great read that touches on our country’s past, and how we broke with it in the era of highways and suburbanization. And also just a really neat piece of trivia. And this neat bit of spooky time-capsule preservation:

“Somewhere downtown the tunnels made a turn to follow the flow of Central Parkway,” Koenig recalls, referring to main east-west artery in downtown Cincinnati. It was in this unlikely spot that Koenig and his friends stumbled into a jarring symbol of international geopolitics. One of the abandoned stations, according to Koenig, had been converted into a fallout shelter, for use during the Cold War.

The end of Korean BBQ in L.A.? What the gas stove ban means for your fave restaurants, Los Angeles Times, Jenn Harris, June 2, 2022

This piece took a beating on social media. It blurs the line, for example, between banning gas hookups in new construction (what LA actually did) and banning gas stoves or requiring retrofitting of existing gas buildings (not what they did.)

Nonetheless, you can imagine how the new regulatory environment will make things harder for restaurants—which still overwhelmingly use gas cooking—and especially for smaller independent restaurants with less money to spare. What happens when the choice of gas stoves begins to narrow? When you need updates to the gas connections, and the labor and permits that go with that sort of thing? It may be that induction stoves are the LED lightbulb in the stove war—the technology that’s both greener and better, or at least just as good. I’m not sure.

A Chinese chef was quoted in the piece:

“The wok itself is really essential to Asian cuisine,” Leo said. “By taking gas away, you’re telling us we cannot use woks anymore, essentially taking away our identity and heritage. It forces us to adapt to American culture.”

Apparently, the gas industry has tried to amplify this line, depicting gas bans as bad for communities of color, or some such corporate skullduggery. Nonetheless, it’s my understanding that gas cooking is pretty much the ideal, reasonably priced way to fire a wok. Who knows more about all of this?

America’s best-selling cars and trucks are built on lies: The rise of fake engine noise, Washington Post, Drew Harwell, January 21, 2015

The engine growl in some of America’s best-selling cars and trucks is actually a finely tuned bit of lip-syncing, boosted through special pipes or digitally faked altogether.

Car enthusiasts mostly don’t like this, but ordinary car buyers do—or at least the automakers think they do. Apparently, modern engines, in addition to be being cleaner and more efficient, are also quieter. But people equate the engine roar with performance, making perfectly good modern engines sound weak. Some of these fake sounds are literally sound files played on a speaker. Me? I’d rather have a quieter ride!

Related Reading:

New and Old #46

New and Old #47

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