The Deleted Scenes - New and Old #65
How LA became the land of strip malls, Curbed, Hadley Meares, October 2, 2019
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. 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.
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. 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:
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: Thanks for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekend subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive of over 300 posts and growing—more than one full year! And you’ll help ensure more material like this! You’re a free subscriber to The Deleted Scenes. For the full experience, become a paid subscriber. |
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Book Talk
Thursday, July 7, 2022
M. Nolan Gray's "Arbitrary Lines" in Washington, DC
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Wednesday, July 6, 2022
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Thoughts on balancing stagnation and total change
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