Village centers versus the village
In the past few weeks I've found myself trying to describe my hometown to various people. For the most part these people have been native NYers and I had been taking any rolling of eyes as a sign of the general highbrow notion of anything non-ny as lame.
But the other night, as I described Columbia as a place designed to be where people of all different socio-economic, religious, and ethnic backgrounds lived together, someone challenged my cheesy tale of a utopia-has-been, and I realized how idiotic I sounded. While poor James Rouse has been in a permanent spin in his grave over the new "development" of Columbia, here I was living in the original thing, NYC.
- different classes/ethnicities/religions: check, check, check
- villages: pick any 2 streets and make a new word, you've got a village
- village centers: can I say 7th Ave, B'way, Bedford Ave . . . ?
- poet-inspired street names that are laid out in a fashion to assure as many dead-ends as possible? hmm, no! damn that cross-grid of numbered streets and avenues.
. . . I guess as long as there is no "Forty Winks Way" NYC will never hit that utopia status.
posted by gordian knot @ Sunday, January 29, 2006
2 Comments:
Nice to see Columbia matches up with the big apple!
By the way your Dad is now into blogging at "Ramblings of a yourg retire guy"
This is getting to be overwhelming. If BK gets a blog, I'll be able to keep tabs on the whole clan.
Incidently, I go to school in Irvine, CA. It's another planned community, but with a completely different master plan. It's all upper-middle class whites and asians. Talk about Rouse rolling over in his grave.
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