The Green Bridge at Mile End Park was pointed out to me as an example of a bridge which seamlessly links parkland on two sides of a busy road — part of the goal of the Bloomingdale Trail.

It’s not exactly the Promenade Plant�e (and not a reuse), but it’s still a nicely landscaped viaduct with some usable retail carved out underneath.

Deleted from Craigslist, but saved for posterity by Wonkette: Senate Hearing on [Federal] Marriage Amendment (6/22/2004) — m4m — 25

(and yes, public space. if not for public spaces, we wouldn’t be having missed connections, would we?)

How cool is the High Line? Cool enough to spawn Highline, a new restaurant in the meatpacking district, but apparently not cool enough to be the defining theme of the restaurant’s (nautical, not rail) decor.

The Project for Public Spaces has an online guided tour of beautiful, functional Parisian public spaces — so friendly to the public that even young children and seniors feel comfortable expressing affection and joy in public. PPS also warns that the unfriendly, overdesigned new parks and ever-expanding roadways threaten the vitality of

“When we compare examples of public spaces in Paris to other cities, we often get the response: ‘Oh… well that is Paris,’ meaning that no other city can compare. Our reply is that Paris is a laboratory for learning about all types of public spaces, both good and bad. Each individual public space, each building, and each street can teach us something important.”

Sure, Paris owes much of its beauty and most of its grand parks to the unprecedented investment lavished upon it by the French state, but many of its finest details cost no more than standard highway street treatments.

The LA Times has a comprehensive, nicely written Column One article on the High Line. Excerpts:
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Today’s the first really warm (over 70F) day here in Chicago. While walking past the Bank One plaza, I tested out one of Holly Whyte‘s old postulates: women sit inside plazas, men sit facing outside. (This has something to do with women seeking out nurturing, sheltered spaces, and something to do with men wanting to watch the passing parade.) Sure enough, of the 14 people sitting on the Dearborn Street seating wall, two were women (14.3%), while 14 of the 30 (46.7%) people sitting on the lower level around the fountain were women. Not quite sex segregation on the level of a second-grade lunchroom, but still pretty close.

Incidentally, this plaza is among the most studied in history. A landscape architecture seminar from UIUC once studied the plaza for their class project back in the early ’80s.

Today’s Trib reports on conservation easement purchases — on five-acre lots in DuPage County. Turns out that some large-lot “estate” subdivisions, some of them the first-generation septic-tank sprawl (the five-acre “ranchette” lots popular in, say, Montana) that pioneered residential out in farming areas, still act as wildlife corridors. I imagine that’s only because the owners didn’t chop the trees, nuke the grass with Chem-Bomb, and put up “privacy fences,” which any one of them was free to do.

This seems like a dangerous precedent and/or an argument against requiring conservation development; it could be said, though, that many of these subdivisions were developed before conservation development techniques were well known, and that purchasing the conservation easements after the fact is not terribly different than purchasing the conservation easements before selling the lots.

An entirely new danger to being in public space: bluejacking, or the trick of sending mysterious messages to random high-tech mobile phones. I should try this sometime.

Funny that: one of my BookCrossing books from last year found its way back to the East Coast.

From the Project for Public Spaces. Critical Mass steals that public space back.

Guest Editorial
SUVs: Stealing the Public Wealth

by David Burwell

“SUVs are so over!” shouts a recent car ad. This is a remarkable claim, especially from a competing car company. Yet, it rings true. With Arianna Huffington linking SUVs to the financing of terrorists in her Detroit Project; evangelical Christians linking them to ecological destruction in their “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign; and even the U.S. Department of Transportation after them for being more (not less) dangerous than average cars due to their tendency to rollover, these are not good times for Detroit’s biggest money-maker.

Roads should honor and dignify people, not diminish them.

What’s going on? It is possible that a subtle but hugely significant shift in America’s collective unconscious is underway fostered by Detroit’s own ad campaigns. These ads imply that SUV purchasers actually own the road, something all of us pay for through our taxes and which are clearly part of the public realm.
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In a given amount of space and time, a green light could move:
One-half of a large truck (0.5 persons + freight)
Two SUVs (2.2 persons, negligible freight)
Three cars (3.3 persons)
Ten bicycles (10 persons)
Twenty pedestrians (20 persons)

Scarce space (and scarce space-time) is part of what defines a city. Fact is, huge cars just don’t fit into cities, and attempts to make them fit are bound to waste everyone’s time. From the Austin Chronicle:
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“I arrived at [Thomas] Kinkade’s Village [at Hiddenbrooke, a subdivision “inspired” by his paintings] expecting to be appalled by a horror show of treacly Cotswold kitsch; I was even more horrified by its absence… no matter how gauzy Kinkade’s vision, there is no question that the current suburban aesthetic makes us want it — bad.” Janelle Brown in Salon.com