vigorousnorth.com
The Vigorous North: December 2013
http://www.vigorousnorth.com/2013_12_01_archive.html
Tuesday, December 10, 2013. I took a walk this weekend out to Westbrook, the city adjoining Portland to our west. Westbrook's Main Street is less than five miles from downtown Portland, but these are small cities and along the borderlands between them there's a still mostly empty landscape of meadows and depopulated infrastructures. And speaking of abandoned infrastructures: on the other side of the marsh I bushwhacked northwards through the woods for a while and found the city's "technology park" (previ...
vigorousnorth.com
The Vigorous North: July 2014
http://www.vigorousnorth.com/2014_07_01_archive.html
Monday, July 21, 2014. Silicon Valley's gentrification export. Airbnb, the DIY hotel service that was born in the crucible of the Bay Area's dystopan income divides and astronomical rents, is now spreading its way across the nation. Middle-class households now have the privilege to literally rent out their own beds in order to clear escalating rents in the nation's more fashionable/expensive vacation destinations. Meanwhile, in Next City. Such a policy could, in theory, let struggling renters continue to...
vigorousnorth.com
The Vigorous North: Art laundry
http://www.vigorousnorth.com/2014/05/art-laundry.html
Wednesday, May 14, 2014. Postcard, c. 1900, from the Detroit Publishing Company collection. Courtesy of collection Marc Walter / published in An American Odyssey. Central Park Gates, by Jean Claude and Christo, 2005. Photo courtesy of The City Project. Posted by C Neal. Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom). Subscribe to blog updates. The first and only Portland Maine Bike Map. Learn more, and find out where you can purchase a copy. We dont sit in trees any more. The Works: Anatomy of a City. I like to hear...
vigorousnorth.com
The Vigorous North: Portland, Maine Bike Map
http://www.vigorousnorth.com/p/portland-maine-bike-map.html
Portland, Maine Bike Map. For five years, I've served on Portland's Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee, which advises city councilors and staff on ways to improve conditions for walkers and cyclists in the City of Portland. For just as long, our group has talked about producing a bike map to promote the city's routes and encourage more people to try using their bicycles for transportation. With a mini-grant from Healthy Portland. Order online from the Bike Coalition of Maine. Gorham Bike and Ski.
vigorousnorth.com
The Vigorous North: Houston Is Weird: David Adickes's Giant Presidents
http://www.vigorousnorth.com/2012/01/houston-is-weird-david-adickess-giant.html
Tuesday, January 17, 2012. Houston Is Weird: David Adickes's Giant Presidents. Then we coasted down a dead-end street and through an open chain-link gate, and saw this:. Left to right: Martin Van Buren, Barack Obama, George Bush Sr., Lyndon B. Johnson, and others (back in 2004, of course, the bust of Barack Obama hadn't been made yet). Lincoln, Jackson, and Theodore Roosevelt. You know the "Keep Austin Weird" bumper stickers? Adickes makes cheap concrete sculptures on a monumental scale. His art is q...
vigorousnorth.com
The Vigorous North: February 2015
http://www.vigorousnorth.com/2015_02_01_archive.html
Tuesday, February 24, 2015. The aesthetics of clean energy. My old employer, Maine Audubon, is a fairly conservative and patrician organization. It's not a strong leader on climate issues: its conservation programs are a lot more preoccupied with piping plovers (cute birds that just happen to live on the same beaches as the organization's plutocrat "major donors") than with ending Maine's self-destructive addiction to fossil fuels. But for those of us who will live with the consequences of that catastrop...
vigorousnorth.com
The Vigorous North: April 2014
http://www.vigorousnorth.com/2014_04_01_archive.html
Thursday, April 03, 2014. Watch Charles and Ray Eames pitch Eero Saarinen's "Mobile Lounges". Jess and I took a vacation to the Grand Canyon last week, which was fantastic — but as spectacular as it the thing that actually inspired me to post on this neglected blog was a bleak bit of airport architecture we encountered on our way home. Image from Wikimedia Commons. I could go into more detail about the details and rationale behind this idea, but luckily for us Saarinen commissioned this wonderful short f...
vigorousnorth.com
The Vigorous North: May 2014
http://www.vigorousnorth.com/2014_05_01_archive.html
Wednesday, May 14, 2014. Postcard, c. 1900, from the Detroit Publishing Company collection. Courtesy of collection Marc Walter / published in An American Odyssey. Central Park Gates, by Jean Claude and Christo, 2005. Photo courtesy of The City Project. Posted by C Neal. Tuesday, May 06, 2014. We don't sit in trees any more. In Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees. Historian Jared Farmer recounts one of the first Earth Day protests in his book Trees in Paradise. A synopsis there recounts how "At Moorpar...
vigorousnorth.com
The Vigorous North: Silicon Valley's gentrification export
http://www.vigorousnorth.com/2014/07/silicon-valleys-gentrification-export.html
Monday, July 21, 2014. Silicon Valley's gentrification export. Airbnb, the DIY hotel service that was born in the crucible of the Bay Area's dystopan income divides and astronomical rents, is now spreading its way across the nation. Middle-class households now have the privilege to literally rent out their own beds in order to clear escalating rents in the nation's more fashionable/expensive vacation destinations. Meanwhile, in Next City. Such a policy could, in theory, let struggling renters continue to...
vigorousnorth.com
The Vigorous North: The aesthetics of clean energy
http://www.vigorousnorth.com/2015/02/the-aesthetics-of-clean-energy.html
Tuesday, February 24, 2015. The aesthetics of clean energy. My old employer, Maine Audubon, is a fairly conservative and patrician organization. It's not a strong leader on climate issues: its conservation programs are a lot more preoccupied with piping plovers (cute birds that just happen to live on the same beaches as the organization's plutocrat "major donors") than with ending Maine's self-destructive addiction to fossil fuels. But for those of us who will live with the consequences of that catastrop...