Why Kissas Intrigue (Places for People), Craig Mod, November 2024

On tiny, sole-proprietor businesses in Japan, many of which are some sort of cafe or restaurant:

I’m here in Saboten, sipping some OK black coffee, drinking a “lemon squash,” eating some buttered toast, smoking a single cigarette, typing these words, knowing that if I had come here twenty years ago it would have been sort of like it was today. Maybe even with some of the same folks chatting with the owners I’m seeing today.

Shōwa is a weird era — spanning war terrors to cute cafés — but the defining characteristic of so many of these beloved Shōwa spaces is simply that they are human. Undeniably human. Sadly, that’s a contemporary rarity: Pillars around which relationships can be formed over the course of a lifetime. Constants against which to measure time. I think often what a contemporary version of a kissa might look like, and think that maybe this younger generation will be the ones to really kick it off.

This is like a lot of things: things which served a social purpose beyond their narrow business, but which did not necessarily do so intentionally or by design; it just kind of worked that way, and worked. We replaced the narrow business of such institutions with what may be technically superior narrow substitutes, but they do not substitute for the wider purpose the old thing informally fulfilled.

This reminds me of a bit in Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, where she talks about urban renewal and the public housing projects. Specifically, there’s a discursion on candy stores, and how dozens of tiny candy stores with an owner known to the neighborhood were replaced by much larger, impersonal stores inside or near the projects, with hourly employees who didn’t, maybe understandably, care to provide the sort of “known and trusted neighborhood confidante” role that the old tiny store proprietors did almost by happenstance.

This is a huge element of what “urbanism” is, and we almost no longer even have the language for it. And there is so much cultural amnesia in America that when we observe the same thing abroad—the same thing that governed American towns and cities really up until midcentury—we find it to be some sort of pleasant but slightly weird only those slightly different can do.

Read the whole thing.

The Four Types of Cities, The Caravan & The Throne, , May 25, 2026

On different kinds of cities:

These types don’t necessarily refer to just city layouts — such as whether the city has a grid plan or winding streets — or their density or the nature or quality of their services. Rather, they are four models for how inhabitants and visitors experience a city, how businesses and functions are distributed, and how different parts of the city are connected. These four models are not mutually exclusive, and indeed, most cities evidence elements of multiple ones, or may have evolved from one type to another.

It’s a quick read with some links to other deeper essays on particular essays. Check it out!

Escaping The Auto-Financial-Industrial Complex, Challenger Cities, , January 7, 2026

Life doesn’t just feel more expensive, it is more expensive. The basic cost of living, from rent to groceries, going out to car payments has all gone up.

Some things take more effort, or feel like that in a realm where we were promised it would be frictionless. And what used to be an option, is now often an obligation.

We tend to describe this as a set of separate problems. A cost-of-living crunch, a housing crisis, a public safety challenge, constant congestion, the hollowing out of neighborhoods. Not to mention this insistence that we must now “return to the office”, delivered with the tone of a Victorian school headmaster who has mistaken obedience for productivity.

These aren’t individual failures, they’re symptoms of an interconnected system that is now chafing against the people living in it.

This is Strong Towns-esque critique about the planning priority of cars and detached houses, and the distance and debt they put on cities and on people. But he specifically critiques car reliance:

Distances became personal inconveniences, band-aided by the freedom promised from the automobile, rather than a public cost to be managed collectively. Mobility was democratised, privatised and ultimately, financialised.

This is interesting, and frankly a little foreign to most Americans: the idea that distance or mobility or proximity are public questions with public answers.

This way of putting the whole thing is also illuminating:

For a long time, this was a tolerable deal.

You could live far from where you worked because cars were cheap enough to fade into the background of the monthly finances. While they might have been a bit of a status symbol, and lead to a bit of keeping up with the Jones’, this was broadly manageable.

The car offered enough comfort that the commutes could be tolerable, so long as the traffic flowed. You could afford a home because land was plentiful, regulations were simple and prices broadly behaved themselves.

The system assumed mobility, and consumer lifestyles, would remain affordable. Only, that assumption has failed … spectacularly.

It reminds me of a point an urbanist I follow made on Twitter a few years ago: car dependence was designed before seatbelts and car seats. In other words, the (mostly positive) evolution of safety standards stranded a lot of people in a sense. You used to just pile everyone in the station wagon; now three or even two kids demand an SUV. One of the weaknesses of conservative thinking, and I say this as as a conservative in the small-c sense, is that we have trouble seeing these structures as optional or chosen things; we often mistake the status quo for reality itself.

There’s a lot more here, but one more bit:

Finance needs to adapt to cities, not force cities to contort themselves around outdated assumptions. We should borrow ideas shamelessly from elsewhere … Europe, Asia, anywhere something works … but translate them to the local context, not imitate them, or say “this would never work here”.

Yep. Read the whole thing.

The Bitter Miracle, Quench Magazine, Matthew Sullivan, January 21, 2010

I just bought my first bottle of Cynar, an Italian bitter liqueur with an artichoke on the label. I’ve always wanted to try it. It’s an amaro, the category of bittersweet herbal liqueurs generally had as aperitifs or digestifs, or as spritzes. Sullivan is writing mostly about a different one, even more bitter apparently:

Fernet Branca is an Italian herbal liqueur with an almost magical ability to assist digestion. No matter how much I eat, no matter how rich the sauce or how fatty the duck, it can calm my stomach. My wife and I take it like medicine when we are afflicted by any sort of dyspepsia, be it the flu or food poisoning. If that weren’t enough, Fernet Branca is also recommended for motion sickness, headaches and hangovers. Since it’s 40 per cent alcohol, it can presumably also be used to disinfect wounds or clean your CD player.

Fernet Branca is part of the family of Italian liqueurs called amari or bitters. In Italy, an amaro is traditionally drunk as a digestif. Like bitters from Germany or France, they are produced by steeping herbs, roots, flowers, bark and spices in alcoholic spirits. The ingredients are limited only by the imagination; some amari contain nuts, fruit peels, vegetables and bits of mineral.

A lot of these liqueurs originated as health tonics, and this particular one was perhaps considered so unpalatable as a drink that it was regulated as a medicine during Prohibition!

As a fossil from Prohibition days (when Fernet Branca was legal to sell as a medicine), it is still popular in San Francisco’s nightclubs. It is usually drunk in shots with a chaser of ginger ale. In New York City, Fernet Branca has established itself as the drink of choice for off-duty bartenders and waiters — partially because it is revivifying, but also because an ability to stomach it signifies that you are an insider. But this is nothing compared with Argentina, where Fernet Branca (mixed with Coke) has the status of a national beverage — sales there exceed 12 million litres a year. That’s about the same amount of annual sales for Ontario’s VQA wines.

I trying a little new thing and then learning about it. Most of the time it’s knowledge I’ll never use, but going out and filling your brain with new ideas is a good thing. Fun little read.

Related Reading:

New and Old #228

New and Old #229

Share

One answer from someone else: Baltimore: “Baltimore is undergoing a phase change in its levels of crime and disorder. Seems on the path that NYC, DC took like 30 and 20 years ago, respectively.” (Shared with a graph showing the murder rate steeply declining.)

Some other answers to the original post: Bolzano, Nanjing, Montreal, Vancouver, Lyon, Philadelphia, Nuremberg, Minneapolis, Providence, Milwaukee, Sacramento, Keelung, Albuquerque. Go check out the post and replies.

This is not just a good question in a trivia sense, or in a “Let’s appreciate all the places that aren’t top 3/top 5 metro areas” sense. It’s a good question also because it reminds us that places change; stars rise and fall. It’s easy to associate a city’s troubles or successes with the place itself. As in the Baltimore example, Baltimore has spent so long as “Baltimore”—murder capital of America, The Wire, etc.—that you can forget those are not inherent characteristics.

Every city that fell on hard times was once a lot more successful; many cities that fell on hard times have come back a lot. Many places desirable and well-loved today were once written off. People don’t think of New York City as Escape From New York anymore, but at one time they did. At one time Old Town Alexandria was a rundown, outdated district that seemed ripe for urban renewal. Etc. etc. There’s a call to imagination and humility here, in seeing the potential of a place, its past and future, it’s possibilities.

On some level this is uncomfortable. We tend to read the current state of things back into the past, and imagine they must always have been like that. But things really do change; judgments made in different times really may have been right, or seemed right, and seem wrong only looking back.

The answers, as noted, are all over the map—literally—from different countries and continents. But my knowledge is mostly of the United States and really mostly of cities I’ve seen or been to or driven by.

One city that comes to mind for me is

Read more

Gillette writes:

I normally wouldn’t post a Stuckey’s postcard here, but it is part of the history of the now-defunct Readington Diner on Route 22 in Whitehouse. Stuckey’s was a chain of “travelmarts” (travelmats?) that started as a pecan and candy store in the 1930s and expanded to include gas pumps.

I am not sure how long this location lasted on Route 22, but the Readington Diner opened on that spot in 1986 and was in business for about 30 years.

Stuckey’s is having a comeback under the leadership of , the granddaughter of the company’s founder. She’s also on Substack, and here she contributes a guest piece on her turnaround of the business at The Retrologist, another great newsletter.

Stuckey’s buildings differed a bit, but they typically had an A-frame-ish roof that sloped down gently, as the one in the postcard does.

Now it is true that the Readington Diner—or, as someone in the comments notes, the V.C. Diner and then later the Readington Diner—opened up on this spot. That structure is still standing today, and after a bit of a facelift, it’s now a restaurant called Kitchen American Grill.

I remembered the Readington Diner back in the day, which if I recall was mediocre, but in a way that was point of these places. We went there once or twice and passed it many more, because Route 22 is a major way around the area. It looked like this:

And its successor restaurant looks like this:

Now, it isn’t at all possible that that Stuckey’s building was actually never torn down, is it?

Well. Anything’s possible, and if you’re reading this, you probably know the answer!

Take a look at this aerial image from the Hunterdon County Parcel Viewer:

Unlike a diner, this building has a peaked roof, which as you can see from the Google Maps screenshots was semi-hidden behind the facade.

The facade is pretty minimal, in fact, and from the side, the building looked, and still more or less looks, like this:

If you look closely, you can make out the signature slope of the Stuckey’s roof:

In fact, to the left of the roof, that little garage-looking extension is even still there, unaltered. Old:

And new:

It appears flipped from the postcard; perhaps there was one of those extensions on both sides at some point, or the postcard might have flipped it. Sometimes they fudged the appearance of things a bit.

As to when it was built, the New Jersey Property Explorer map says 1980. That sounds pretty late for a roadside chain from the 1930s. I looked at NETR’s Historic Aerials, and it shows the building in 1956!

The earliest newspaper reference I can find for Stuckey’s in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey is a 1962 ad in the Courier-News, a Somerville (nearby town) paper:

Here, from 1970, in the same paper, is an ad for the Stuckey’s:

The first reference to the V.C. Diner is 1986; in 1995 it was majorly renovated, and in 1996 it was changed to the Readington Diner, as this 2006 newspaper story recounts. This was a continuous business; during the Readington Diner phase it was helmed by the sister of the two brothers who had run it as V.C., and her husband. The article also mentions its origin as a Stuckey’s, which was not common in New Jersey.

Someone on a diner preservation blog also knows this bit of history. In a comment, he wrote:

Also, in regards to the VC diner. It was built in the late 50’s or early 60’s and began life as the northernmost store in the Stuckey’s chain. I lived just up the dirt road between it and the Wonder Bar.

The blog entry itself is great too if a little sad, with a lot of photos of endangered diners, two of which were nearby on Route 22 and only one of which is still standing. I remember passing them, when they were both abandoned for a period, as a kid, many times.

Even then, that idea of abandonment, of things not that long ago receding into the past, struck me. In a lot of ways I think that was the genesis of my interest in all of this stuff.

It’s really fun and rewarding to write one of these about something I’ve seen a million times, and tell a little story that I, and very few people probably, knew; to see a familiar place a little differently, to imagine the layers and changes that it came from and which made it what it is, and will be.

Related Reading:

Ghost Of The Highways

Pecan Log Rolls and Hotel Rooms

From Everywhere To Last

Share

Now Annandale, for those of you outside of Northern Virginia or the D.C. area, is a diverse and interesting community, but it’s also an aging auto-centric suburb, with lots of asphalt, old strip malls, and small buildings from various eras just kind of crammed together. It’s exactly the sort of place I find interesting. It forces you to think about what immigration and diversity mean in America today, and also what urbanism means or should mean.

Kim’s business fascinated me for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s the kind of business that is so intuitive and obvious, yet so rare in America: one person’s passion shared with mostly local customers. Really almost more of a lightly monetized hobby than even a small business, per se; one scale-step below a “small business,” if you will. Like this.

It’s a reminder of how much we are missing out on by making it difficult to run a tiny business. So Virginialicious is like a little taste—pun intended—of the cultural and economic landscape we could enjoy if we opened up more opportunity for micro-scale enterprises.

The other reason I wanted to learn and write about Virginialicious is that the idea of a walking food tour in an old, pedestrian-unfriendly, and frankly somewhat rundown looking old suburban commercial district, is fascinating to me. As I put in the GGWash piece:

The idea of a walking food tour in suburbia is novel and, as a travel or experience product, almost unheard of. Yet, this business idea and labor of love from an immigrant is a particular illustration of a general point: In the Washington region and many other US metro areas, much of the immigration, food culture, and general human interest is now taking place outside of the legacy cities.

This is, in a lot of ways, the central reason why I write this newsletter, and why I find this cluster of “urbanist” issues so fascinating. I like cities, I think cities should be properly urban, more walkable, less oriented around car traffic and parking, etc. But the aspect of all this that really pulls me in is how urbanism does, and is going to, look in the other 90 or 95 percent of America’s built landscapes. Places, in other words, like Annandale.

And it seemed to me that Mina Kim was in many ways doing the same thing I am doing—appreciating the cultural complexity of these old suburbs, thinking about walkability in a car-oriented pattern, about the tension between improving a place and gentrifying it—from a completely different angle of attack, as it were, but finding many of the same realities on the ground.

Older suburbs are underdogs. They are complex, deeply settled places with layers of complexity and identity. Scraping that away could well turn out to be a mistake on the order of running expressways through urban slums. You can replace buildings, but you can’t build a sense of home and place, or the kind of settledness that comes from patterns of use and life over decades. Suburban architecture may have been built more like consumer products than monuments or heirlooms. But communities like Annandale are proof that they can indeed be heirlooms.

Now Virginialicious might seem almost like a reproducible concept: Pick an immigrant community or cuisine, and brand it as an exploration of an unlikely bit of human interest in suburbia.

Koreans are far from the only immigrant or ethnic group in the Washington region; they just happen to be the ethnic group to which Kim belongs. There’s the largely Vietnamese Eden Center in Falls Church. If you hop the state line, there’s Silver Spring’s Ethiopian community; the suburban Chinatown of Rockville; and the heavily Latino corridors in places like Langley Park.

But these are all entire communities, not just collections of businesses or attractions. It isn’t that simple to “sell” them as tourist destinations, and Virginialicious is not that simple or reductive either. It’s not based on a “let’s go discover this foreign cuisine!” attitude. Kim and Park are both Korean, know the language, and deeply know and love the culture. It would be necessary—and, Kim says, rather tricky—to find another one of her or Park for every Washington region immigrant community. And that would be necessary to do it respectfully, and to do it well.

Part of this is cultural sensitivity. But there’s also a business aspect: mom-and-pop business owners aren’t always interested in having a large, boisterous group descend on their restaurant. Having someone who shares the language and culture make the pitch helps gain trust.

That’s another reason I found Virginialicious so interesting: out of all of them immigrant communities and their restaurants you could imagine something like this being done for or about, it’s still strikingly rare. I take this to mean that there a great lag in general understanding as to how much of suburbia has evolved, how the immigrant experience often begins here now, and how this challenges both the folks who want suburbia to be bland and conformist (and, sometimes, implicitly white), and the city boosters who sometimes hold that outdated impression of what suburbia is.

All of this is approached in a completely different and obviously much less political way, in one of these Virginialicious Korean food tours. It’s a kind of “show, don’t tell” for a whole massive and barely recognized shift in American culture and land use.

I don’t want to quote much of the piece here because I want you to read it over at Greater Greater Washington. Check it out!

Related Reading:

New Jersey’s Little India

The Culture In The Suburbs

Does Anyone Like Suburbia?

Serendipity And Proximity

What’s So Bad About It?

Share

This is an interesting way to put this point, about the way these seemingly arcane, technocratic rules really affect culture and daily habits and the feel of a place:

If your neighborhood doesn’t have a small coffee shop nearby, you won’t buy coffee that often. I understand, of course, that you in particular may continue to go out of your way for coffee, but in aggregate, this will be a much less coffee drinking area.

I’m talking about the texture of your life — whether you enjoy going to your grocery store, whether there’s anywhere for you to sit outside your home, or what you decide to do on an afternoon when the weather’s nice and you’re done with work. The rhythm of a neighborhood is the result of what’s within reach. People take the path of least resistance — you do what’s easy, you skip what’s hard, and over time that becomes your life.

This isn’t just how the world naturally works — these are deliberate political decisions being made on your behalf, often without your input.

He goes on to mention the dearth of, and high cost of, daycare, and the problem of aging people forced to drive to get around, as also downstream, at least in part, from zoning. And they are.

This is one of the most important points of all:

If you wanted to run a small business out of your home — in most parts of the US, that’s illegal. Sometimes it’s legal to run the business, but it’s illegal for customers to visit you at that business. This prevents a lot of the wonderful tiny businesses that exist, for example, in Japan where people have a cafe that they run out of the first floor of their home. You don’t allow entrepreneurship, where somebody can for a summer try out running a cookie shop out of their home and then they can graduate to something bigger. The barrier to entry is much higher when you need to rent a space just to start a tiny business — think of how many cookie shops we’ve missed out on!

And as noted above, this is another reason I’m skeptical of the idea that “culture” is some metaphysical woo-woo thing that just exists, like God, outside of incentives or influences or economics. A great deal of culture is shaped by what is allowed, and what is allowed shapes what seems feasible. This is why I say urbanism is one of the most fundamental issue sets there is; at bottom it is about how to live with one another and how to be fully human.

Why Albuquerque’s NIMBYs Fear Neighborhood Life, ABQ Urbanist, , March 26, 2026

This is related to the piece above, fittingly.

In a recent Albuquerque Journal op-ed, Dinelli praised the conservative bloc of councilors who voted to gut or reject some of the city’s modest pro-housing and pro-livability reforms. He described neighborhood-scale retail as a likely “magnet for crime,” cast duplexes and casitas as threats to neighborhood stability, and portrayed people advocating for more homes as radicals bent on destroying Albuquerque’s neighborhoods.

It was a revealing piece not because it offered a serious diagnosis of the city’s housing problems, but because it so clearly expressed the old fear at the heart of Albuquerque’s anti-housing politics: the fear that neighborhoods might have to change to allow other people in. Like many members of Albuquerque’s anti-housing coalition, Dinelli is a supply skeptic. He acknowledges that housing costs are a problem, but refuses to accept the basic implication: if a city has made it difficult to build enough homes, then it will become more expensive to live there.

Of course, a lot of this is just either crankery or political self-interest (a lot of local politicians feel pressured to back NIMBYs, not even necessarily because they’re a majority, but because they’re louder and more organized).

But it also fits with my point above that, basically, we very easily confuse liking what we know for knowing what we like. These urbanist priorities feel radical to a lot of people simply because, in a sense, they are; we’re not used to urban living, and we’re not used to the freedoms of more dynamic neighborhoods and lower barriers to entrepreneurship.

It’s easy to look at places where that works, and think well, they can do it because they’re different. They’re Europeans. They’re Japanese. They’re not like us. That’s why rediscovering America’s own urban heritage, including the striking urbanity of many American small towns, is so important to me.

There’s a lot more in the piece; read the whole thing.

Does Anyone Really Know What Tiki Is?, Punch, Chloe Frechette, April 24, 2019

This phenomenon of things being named and categorized looking back, imposing a storyline or structure on them that really isn’t there, is fascinating:

When the first-ever Pearl Diver Punch emerged from a discreet bar at Los Angeles’ Don the Beachcomber in the 1930s it signaled a dramatic shift. The drink, festooned with a geranium leaf and edible flowers and served in a bespoke glass, was the antithesis of the spartan three-ingredients formulas—Manhattan, Martini, Old-Fashioned—that had defined the bar world’s status quo for the last half-century. It belonged to an entirely new category of cocktail.

Today we call it tiki, but it wasn’t always so. “Back in the day, during the Golden Age of what we now call tiki drinks, they were never called that,” explains Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, the genre’s leading historiographer. (It was only after the drinks had faded from mainstream phenomenon to cultural artifact that the name emerged, borrowing from the central motif of the genre: tiki totems.) During their midcentury heyday, what we now refer to as tiki drinks were known interchangeably as exotic cocktails, tropical cocktails, Polynesian drinks or, in Don the Beachcomber’s parlance, “rhum rhapsodies.”

It was, in part, the very drama of these eye-catching drinks—the Shark’s Tooth, Missionary’s Downfall, the Zombie—that allowed the specifics of the genre to evade codification for so long. The formulas themselves, with their complex blends of rums and unusual modifiers like falernum and orgeat, were ruled by a certain behind-the-scenes rigorousness. But from the outside, the imprecise notion that “you know it when you see it” has long dictated the limits (or lack thereof) of tiki. “When you start calling something a tiki drink, now you have to define that,” says Berry, “but nobody did define that right when the drinks were being created.”

Berry is quoted further: “To try and retroactively apply constrictions to the genre proves challenging because, as Berry puts it, ‘you’re creating parameters that never were for a category that never was.’”

But it kind of can be defined:

“It all comes down to the punch formula,” says Berry, referencing the classic Planter’s Punch, a West Indies staple since the colonial era, the components of which are immortalized in a well-trod-out rhyme: one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong and four of weak. Tiki takes this baseline recipe and fractures each requisite component into multiples of each. It is, as Berry concludes, “a Caribbean drink squared, or cubed.”

Of course, you don’t think of Tiki as Caribbean, because of the whole caricatured Hawaiian/Polynesian theme, but that just shows how marketing can create real culture that ends up having a life of its own. That’s really cool. Read the whole thing.

America Stopped Making Its Own Textiles. One Mill Never Did., PureSource, , April 25, 2026

I love this:

Most of the mill towns still exist—Paterson NJ, Cohoes NY, Agusta GA, Manchester NH, and on, and on. But what they were—the role they played—has largely slipped from memory. Industrial giants like Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, once the largest textile mill in the world, have faded along with the system they helped build. The rivers still run. In many cases, the buildings still stand. But the industry that once defined them is gone.

Well… almost gone.

In Thomaston, Georgia, there is still a mill producing sheets and towels on American soil—one that traces its roots back to that same era. Thomaston Mills has been making fabric since 1899, and today—along with its direct-to-consumer brand American Blossom Linens—it is the oldest continuously operating sheet mill in the United States. At a time when the industry has largely moved overseas, an operation like this seems almost out of place today.

So how did this happen? How did a textile mill founded in 1899 survive—while most of the American textile industry disappeared?

Isn’t it strange how a thing can come to seem “out of place” simply by continuing to exist? I find these last stragglers from generally defunct or obsolete concepts fascinating. (I’ve written more than one piece headlined “The Last…”)

He blames unfair trading practices, which is really not the only factor, but it’s impossible to think that it isn’t one:

We’ve seen this pattern again and again—when domestic regulations and perverse foreign incentives drive manufacturing overseas, American factories shut down. Entire industries are hollowed out. In textiles alone, more than a million American jobs were lost.

And he argues that we may have seen a cheap-foreign-goods interlude, and that preferences will swing back the other way:

Today, Thomaston Mills is still producing sheets and towels domestically more than a century after it began. It’s tempting to see it as a lone holdout—a monument from a bygone era standing against the shifting tides of global manufacturing. But we shouldn’t think of it that way. Rather, it has become a beacon helping to guide a new generation of companies (like American Giant, Buck Mason, Harvest & Mill, LA RELAXED, and Imogene + Willie) that are recommitting to domestic production and rebuilding capabilities that were once taken for granted. This is only the beginning.

We’ll find out!

Related Reading:

New and Old #226

New and Old #227

Share

Some form of “car-free” or “car-lite” life is possible for many if not most people for some point in their lives. Kids who go away to college experience it. If someone lives very close to a transit stop that roughly serves their place of work, or if one or both spouses work remotely, you can almost certainly get by with one car (though you very likely still have two).

And, of course, lots of people get by this way by necessity—because they can’t afford more than one car, and maybe not a reliable car, either. This is just one way in which the near-necessity of car ownership imposed by the American built environment is a tax on people and families.

But as a general matter, for most people with the means to own or lease them, two cars per family is the minimum to be able to exercise mobility at a moment’s notice, without planning ahead or negotiating who needs the car when. In America, two cars as a general matter is normal and expected.

The point is, if those people could by and large get by, without feeling much inconvenience, with just a single car, that would be a big, big deal. It’s nowhere near a “ban cars” scenario that perhaps some people imagine. But it’s also half the number of cars for a great deal of the American middle and upper-middle class.

I’m thinking of this because I read this from , in his nice recent piece “Questions From the Front Lines of the Housing Crisis”:

The tension residents feel around parking and cars is real. If everyone depends on driving for every trip, adding more housing naturally increases stress on the system.

But the solution isn’t to stop evolving. The solution is to create alternatives to constant car dependence.

The more people can walk or bike for short trips, the less pressure there is on parking and traffic. Even modest improvements matter. Sidewalks. Connected street networks. Local businesses near homes. Reliable regional transit links.

The goal is not to eliminate cars overnight. The goal is to gradually create a community where households can rely a little less on multiple vehicles.

(I would add, and I’m sure Marohn agrees, that the goal is not eliminate cars at all, but to gradually find a proper and less prominent place for them in our land use and transportation.)

Read more

I often write about this sor…

Read more

Read more

Monte, the Mich…

Read more

This is an article I wish I had written, and which I roughly had the idea to write, but it was already done, and the business owner it’s about has retired, so his store and product are not around anymore.

It’s about Tom Calhoun, who owned Calhoun’s Ham House in Culpeper, Virginia …

Read more

I asked my wife if this idea existed in China, as far as she knew. Obviously it’s not quite comparable, because most people don’t own a private automobile, and China doesn’t have the affluence or the car culture that America has, and certainly not 20 or 30 years ago or more. That’s to say that urban living and the ways of doing things that go along with it are just much more normal and expected there.

She thinks it’s a strange idea. She described growing up in a city in China as being near lots of things: pretty good transit, lots of places you could walk—a park, restaurants, friends’ and relatives’ homes—and stores and markets, you name it. It wasn’t some kind of deprivation, or seen that way by anybody. It was proximity to lots of stuff. After all, that is really what cities are at the most basic level.

Yet I myself wrote this once:

“Selling” walkability is kind of like

Read more

It mi…

Read more

Read more

I don’t care much about this, personally; I’ve long since been using LED bulbs in my home, …

Read more

This is extremely important, and is probably not understood well by regular people. It’s a kind of Schrödinger’s Apartment Building—impossible to build but also going up everywhere. And—frankly—I view this entire “discretionary” process as more or less legalized corruption.

In most maj…

Read more

Another Lancaster-area tourism season is looming. It begins, traditionally, with the opening of the Sight & Sound Theatre in March. Or, depending on your activity preferences, perhaps with the snow geese migration in late February at the nearby Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area.

Over the last couple of years, there were widely publicized concerns in the media about the shortage of traditional (or “traditional”) Amish restaurant capacity, following the December 2021 closure of Good ‘N Plenty, the fire at Hershey Farm in January 2023, and the closures over the last several years of a handful of smaller Amish or Amish-themed restaurants. One typical news story, from early 2023, read:

With barely more than a month before the season begins, the area is down more than 1,000 seats at Pennsylvania Dutch-style restaurants since this time last year.

Good ‘N Plenty in East Lampeter Twp. closed in early 2022, taking 600 restaurant seats out of service….

“It is a real concern on the Route 30 corridor there: where are these buses going to go?”

This was for the most part a weird, one-time logistical logjam: a catastrophic fire happened to line up with the squeeze of the post-pandemic economy. The Hershey Farm complex reopened this last July, and another anxious bit of news—the expected closure of the iconic Dutch Haven store in Ronks, reported in January 2023—turned out not to happen after all.

Despite the restaurant and Amish kitsch situation looking a little more secure as 2025’s tourism season arrives, there’s a deeper anxiety under those old news stories. Was—is—Amish Country subtly changing, maybe permanently? Was something like gentrification happening—with the arrival in recent years of Wegmans and Whole Foods, the smattering of longtime business closures, and the pandemic-era “discovery” of Amish Country by occasional long-term Philadelphia commuters? Will tour buses full of largely older folks, who may have been children when modern Amish Country tourism began, still be able to find tables at a smorgasbord? And will those buses still come? In five or 10 years?

No doubt some real changes have occurred, and have been occurring. The pandemic altered settlement and commuting patterns, with many ex-urbanites finding solace in the communities around the Lancaster area. The emergence of a larger penumbra of typical suburban sprawl around the urban core of Lancaster City, and the region’s intensifying traffic, can make it feel like its distinct identity is being lost. Anecdotes—the closure or redevelopment of an iconic smorgasbord here, a new big-box store there—can start to look like patterns.

I spoke to Joel Cliff from Discover Lancaster, Amish Country’s major tourism organization, to find out what the folks in charge of the tourism industry think about the last few years’ developments. Of course, it’s their job to spin events to fit the conclusion that Lancaster is thriving and you should visit! No surprise, that’s what was conveyed to me. But that doesn’t make it incorrect.

Cliff was unconcerned about the restaurant capacity issue. A few of the less notable restaurants had closed, and Good ’N Plenty wasn’t coming back. But—we spoke before its reopening—Hershey Farm was building a massive new restaurant, including a section for “pass-the-plate” all-you-can-eat family-style dining. (It turns out that option is only offered for large groups, with the main dining option being a self-serve smorgasbord, but it does mean a dining option almost synonymous with Amish Country exists again after the Good ’N Plenty closure.)

But this isn’t just about all-you-can-eat restaurants.

Read more

I’ve driven around or through this a …

Read more

What I’m doing here is sharing and footnoting interesting chats with Google Gemini, to show you some of how it works o…

Read more

Read more

When I got out of Union Station, it took me about 15 minutes to figure out where the Streetcar stop actually was. How was I to guess it would be in the middle of a six‑lane, high‑traffic road and about 150 feet from the closest crosswalk on the far north s…

Read more