How LA became the land of strip malls, Curbed, Hadley Meares, October 2, 2019

Strip malls in Los Angeles were not always such a non-event. On October 24, 1924, Los Feliz Boulevard in Glendale was backed up with 11,000 cars, boasting license plates from 34 states. They were there to experience an innovation in convenience, Ye Market Place, the Southland’s first drive-in market—and the grandmother to the corner strip mall.

Strip malls, like motels, come in L, U, and I shapes. While they are understood to have arisen in the Los Angeles area, within a few years they were everywhere, including a 1931 shopping center in what was then the Washington, D.C. streetcar suburb of Cleveland Park.

These aging, ordinary strip malls that litter the LA area are full of all sorts of independent restaurants and businesses. These are not the huge shopping plazas anchored by big-box stores. They’re just little strips of small stores, along the same lines as the D.C.-area strip malls I pictured here. It’s a paradox I often see, and write about: the sense of energy and diversity in these places feels like a real city, and yet the land use is so opposed to that. But maybe it isn’t.

I think it’s fascinating that these were known in the 1920s as “drive-in markets”; the idea of using your car for such mundane errands on a daily basis was still a novelty.

Read the whole thing.

Tales in restoring a century-old Baltimore rowhouse, The Baltimore Banner, Tim Prudente, June 27, 2022

This is a beautiful piece about restoring an old home: all the things that can and go wrong, the learning curve, and the eventual satisfaction.

Baltimore has a surplus of these solid but decrepit buildings, which were built well enough to be essentially rebuilt from the inside.

The brick-and-frame, 1800s rowhouse sat vacant for two years near the banks of the Jones Falls. No one bid on the house at auction (Did they know something?). I bought it from the bank. The real estate agent, upon peering into the dank blackness of the basement, suggested, “You go first.”

I’ve seen bits and pieces of news from Detroit suggesting that this sort of thing is picking up steam there. If you know what you’re doing, tons of these old buildings are salvageable. This isn’t work that a developer does. It’s often a passion project, but I’m sure it’s generally good for the neighborhood, and immensely satisfying to complete.

Is D.C.’s Chinatown a Chinatown in name only?, WAMU, Ruth Tam; Patrick Fort; Shweta Watwe; Ann Marie Awad, June 9, 2022

TLDR: it’s complicated. The D.C. neighborhood we now call Chinatown wasn’t the first Chinatown in D.C., that one having been more or less totally demolished and redeveloped. Rockville, Maryland is widely considered the “real” Chinatown in the D.C. area, but that’s a little simplistic. This piece gets into migration patterns, urban renewal and displacement, and more.

Similar to how Rockville became a center for Chinese businesses and restaurants, Eden Center, the heavily Vietnamese strip mall I’ve written a lot about out in the Virginia suburbs, began when a largely Vietnamese community was displaced for Metro construction in Arlington.

What if Working at Home Makes Us Drive More, Not Less?, Slate, David Zipper, April 7, 2021

I don’t know if this has turned out to be true, and I’m sure it depends on a lot of factors. But it’s interesting. Much of what’s proposed is indirect, as here:

Over time, teleworking could lead people to spend even more time sitting behind the wheel. What if Sheila decides after a year of part-time teleworking that she can stomach a longer commute to the office, since she only has to do it three times per week? That leads her to trade her suburban home for a bigger one in a sparsely populated exurb where destinations like restaurants or stores are further away (and alternative modes, like transit or biking, are unlikely to be as convenient). “After COVID we’ll have people relocating farther out,” says Patricia Mokhtarian, a professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “When they do commute, they’ll be traveling longer distances.” In a 2005 study, Mokhtarian and her colleagues concluded that teleworking can modestly reduce driving, but she says the effects dissipate as teleworkers move further from the central city.

What do you think? Or rather, how have your own driving/transportation habits changed if you are now remote or hybrid and were not before?

Related Reading:

New and Old #50

New and Old #51

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