May 11, 2020
The Things I Wrote for Curbed
The New Jersey Meadowlands and Turnpike at their most poetic.
Because the future of Curbed is a bit unclear, I decided to go through everything I’ve written for them over the past five years — during Kelsey Keith’s tenure as editor-in-chief — and make copies of all my stories. In the process, I reread it all.
I haven’t updated my list of things I’ve written in a long, long time and I’ll do that — eventually — in a methodical way. But right now I just wanted to post a list of my fave Curbed pieces , my top ten, in no particular order:
1. In which I try to figure out how the Regional Plan Association’s proposed Meadowlands National Park might ever conceivably happen.
2. I explore the revival of Moshe Safdie’s most famous work, Habitat ’67.
3. A couple of days on the Texas Gulf Coast trying to make sense of America’s most prolific (and infamous) designer of man-made rivers.
4. An investigation of how the man-made hills of Governors Island were engineered and built.
5. A look at the way Mecanoo’s Francine Houben was designing the future of New York and Washington’s most loved and hated libraries.
6. A look at what New York City could do to save its mom-and-pop stores from extinction. (And, yes, an update on this subject is urgently needed.)
7. A story about that very tall building next to the Manhattan Bridge and the other very tall buildings that were planned for an obscure neighborhood called Two Bridges.
8. My contribution to the vast amount of verbiage devoted to the flamboyant centerpiece of Hudson Yards, sometimes known as the Doner Kebab or the Heatherwick Object.
9. One of several recent stories advancing the notion that there are a lot of problems, like the housing shortage, that the public sector might be able to address more effectively than the private sector.
10. And a perennial favorite, an account of a long walk to LaGuardia Airport.