From GOOD.is, The Slow Issue. Originally posted by Alissa Walker on January 13, 2010 at 7:00 am PST. Cross-posted on Jane’s Walk Phoenix.
Reading a City
How the built environment instructs us on how to move through it
Greene Street Jane Jacobs wrote about the “ballet” of the street when describing the rhythm of her Greenwich Village neighborhood, which she viewed as a choreographed exchange between resident and sidewalk, and shopkeeper and stoop. Not too far away, Greene Street in New York’s SoHo neighborhood pulses with the same syncopated footsteps and echoes of Jacobs’s legacy. She prevented this entire neighborhood from becoming the Lower Manhattan Expressway—now cars shudder down the street, forced into submission by century-old cobblestones. The former cast-iron warehouses have been fashioned into frilly storefronts for the well-heeled (and often high-heeled) who stop, gape up at their pillared facades; pause; peer into the jewel-like windows; and are rewarded with detail…
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