Last week, a group called the Urban Repair Squad painted sound-effect words—”Thunk!” “Oof” and the like—along Toronto’s Harbord Street where potholes and other perils threaten cyclists. They’re calling the project “Pothole Onomatopoeia.”
Popularity: 20% [?]
When we speak of the identity of a place, we express a recognition of the patterns formed around us. We may not be conscious of them to the point of being able to draw them back with precision like Stephen Wiltshire, but we can remember them in the abstract, and in this way, identify different places from the abstractions we recall of their patterns. This is how one street can look sufficiently alike another that we can identify a neighborhood, and it is also why a landscape like Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto can feel like New York City, despite the fact that every object has been reconfigured to create a parody environment.
Popularity: 27% [?]
Sharon Zukin had come to Greenwich Village and the Shrine of St. Jane not as a pilgrim but to wax sardonic.
Ms. Zukin, a Brooklyn College sociology professor, stared at the modest red-brick town house on Hudson Street that once was home to Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” celebrated the joyous hodgepodge of New York’s neighborhoods: the working-class tailor and the artist, the Italian grocer and the writer, living cheek by jowl.
Popularity: 29% [?]