Free Beer Friday Guess The City

It's Back!!1!

I'm even going to give some healthy hints because this place is so soulless and devoid of all/anything interesting that you'll need it.

In the 50s/60s, London decided, "oy, we're bloody overcrowded, mate." So they decided to build cities, aka satellite towns for residents well outside the city limits despite the fact that they just had the ish bombed out of them a decade ago and had plenty of rebuilding to do. Out to the countryside mate.

So the biggest, best, and brightest architects of the day, including one Norman Foster, were hired to concoct and construct the grandest city evar!

The following images depict the city as I know it. Meaning, as google earth represents it. Meaning, sure as sh1t looks as soulless in images as I expect it to in person. Meaning, "man, nobody seems to be in any of those pictures."

It is the perfect modernist paradigm on the level of Brasilia or Canberra. There is no connection or intermingling between various "pods" of development which exist in isolation between the transportation infrastructure which also exists only in an abstract singularity. It moves. You live over there. Grunt. Groan. Caveman club girl on head. Drag by hair.

In many ways it is the perfect modernist city. Everything is its own monoculture, streamlined, assembly lined. Modernism hates messiness. Urbanism is just too messy. So is life. So is democracy. Let's hire some starchitects. They'll design something perfect. In abstract. That ignores all surroundings. And if we're lucky, maybe they'll even make fun of us with their design. Oh how I wish I had enough money to hire a starchitect who will design a Raccoon Trap that will poke fun at all of us.

Okey doke. Guess the city either in the comments or by strolling up and yelling out the name of the city at the bar I'll be patronizing tonight, one State & Allen Lounge in uptown Dallas, with their super tasty pizza and burgers, set in the midst of one of the most walkable neighborhoods in all of Dallas:

We need sculpted people because 1) they're more perfect than real people, and 2) real people are never here...

CNU-NTX Happy Hour

Now, as an official part of the Congress of New Urbanism (North Texas Chapter), we've decided to begin a monthly happy hour for one and all. It will be the last Thursday of every month at the Londoner in the heart of the State-Thomas neighborhood of uptown Dallas, beginning TONIGHT! From 5:30 to 7:30 or whenever anybody is ready to leave.

Eventually, we plan on beginning project/development tours as well to coincide with happy hours or urban conversations that the CNU hosts in order to raise the level of dialog and understanding while democratizing the conversation as well as any resident of the city can be just the urbanist of a practicing professional. For tonight though, it will just be about tasty adult beverages, conversations about cities, development, urbanism, or what have you, amongst friends (old and new) and colleagues.

So if you care about your city or your neighborhood, come on out. Brian McLaren promises to buy a beer for the first three attendees (not sure if that includes himself and yours truly), but I intend to double down on his offer as well. Perhaps for the last three survivors. I am Irish after all.

WalkableDFW Happy Hour

Have you ever noticed how many bars are named after cities? Funny how the romance of the urban experience lives in our consciousness. Good thing we have so many anti-urban policies in place to extinguish those flames. It IS best to throw the baby right on out with the bathwater.

The WalkableDFW happy hour is another semi-guess the city. Again, guess the city in order to figure out this week's bar of choice.

Hint 1: this is easy

Hint 2: it's nice = patio

Hint 3: there are several throughout the metroplex so feel free to choose the one closest to your present or future location, as I'll be doing.

On to the show:

**Note: If you wear an Arsenal jersey, I may just punch you in the face...ya know, to live up to the hooliganism in us all.

Free Beer Guess the City: Making its Triumphant Return

Back by popular demand, tonight after normal working hours the Walkable DFW happy hour can be found at Sol Irlandes downtown. No textual clues, just photographic ones and plenty of them for maximum possibility of me leaving something obvious for you to find:

Guesses in the comments. First correct answer gets a beer on this guy. Remember kids, work hard, play hard.

Bars of a Different Scale

Ryan Avent has a post up at his personal blog, The Bellows, about wanting neighborhood scaled bars in DC after a recent visit to London, famed for its neighborhood pubs, not much unlike Cheers where it acts as a hub of the community. He goes on to both suggest that nightlife demands clustering while lamenting it from a personal standpoint. Can't we have just a regular quiet bar that is able to make ends meet by local clientele?

The answer is yes, as I've detailed in the Parking Paper and some of the discussions regarding Greenville Ave., Henderson Ave., and the potential of Ross Ave as the regional conduit for the activities too intense for the neighborhood scale of Greenville/Henderson.

I also posted this in the comments at his blog:

You’re absolutely right to call out the causes/effects of clustering. What we are dealing with in Dallas is a case where the clustering is happening on traditional neighborhood service streets where you once found a full ecology of commercial establishments. They all became bars drawing from the entire metroplex. The parking and the noise eat into the nearby neighborhoods causing conflict.

The solution I have been proposing is to designate neighborhood centers distinct from regional centers. These have to be located in areas suitable to supporting the varying scales, ie a regional center has to be supported by the regional transpo infrastructure, such as having a regional metro stop there. It should also have a parking authority to manage supply/demand of parking and price it accordingly. Because of the increased infrastructure, these will also be denser areas.

On the other hand, neighborhood centers should probably have a parking cap, so that retail doesn’t over cluster in certain areas, thus protecting neighborhoods and a BID be established to manage the array of business types in support of the nearby neighborhoods. These will be less dense/less intense areas but there will be a broader array of retailers serving daily needs of the neighborhood. It behooves the businesses to be sized and scaled for the neighborhood and vice versa.

To sketch out what these look like, I think of New Orleans. Where Bourbon Street is the regional draw (or larger) and the place for loud and rowdy, Magazine Street might be that neighborhood service spine and there might only be a bar every few blocks that belongs to and is supported by the neighborhood.

Friday Happy Hour

Not a guess the City, but guess the bar* where I'll be at this evening:

*Not intended to be challenging

Free Beer Friday Guess the City

The Happy Hour today will be once again at the Elbow Room at the behest of the birthday girl. I think I'll be riding my bike, no promise of what time I will be arriving or departing however. Shuffleboard table awaits, indeed.

Difficult one today in my estimation.

A sleepy little village, one that might be the quintessential European mountainside hamlet occupying a hopeful portion of the neo-cortex. A place we dream of perhaps one day visiting if it indeed exists. It does, which is also why once it was rediscovered (again) by hikers during the middle of the 20th century it eventually gained in popularity amongst artists, writers, and various others in search of a temporary peace of mind in order to free that portion responsible for imagination to be set free, no longer occupied with the thoughts of whether such a place might exist.

Before that however, we must retrace the cities roots. It sprung up as a crossroads town between resource, production & manufacturing, and market as many have throughout history. In this case, an empire in search of iron for various tools of warfare and engineering. Eventually, like all empires it whithered away as its nearby resource was found more attainable elsewhere until it was found again in medieval ages where a few families existed long enough for just one elderly person to be found by the hikers, who immediately did what new, hopeful and empowered micro-empires do, they bought the place. All of it.

Fortunately, since it was so remote and isolated, lacking various infrastructure including any improvements to the nearly two millennium-old roads, still fifteen feet wide and made of stone just as they had been built, no electricity or running water beside the mountain stream running past and with little as of yet demand to add such technological pleasantries, it remained, cheap as can be. Cheap enough for artists to colonize anyway, thus making it popular and bringing it to a spec of the world's awareness where it sits, largely unchanged and fortunately not yet Disneyfied.

Perhaps to assist, these are several pages of Jane Jacobs' words, filtered and distilled through my own caustical perspective. And even if you were to find the book I am referencing here (it is one of her much lesser known), making this guess the city more difficult is that Janey was using the name of the region, not the Commune where it now houses less people than some might have graduated high school with...or at least in my case, began high school with before attrition. Who woulda thought high school was so difficult. But I digress:

If nothing else, this place represents a new world where in the age of google earth and the internet, nothing disappears...unless we want them to.















And here is a reminder: Don't be an ass this weekend.