Truckee’s Railyard Project
While the City of Sacramento’s redevelopment plans for the 240-acre Downtown Railyards appear to be getting closer to reality, another railyard project is progressing 100 miles east along the route of the first transcontinental railroad in Downtown Truckee (CA). The approximately 75-acre Truckee Railyard area, which is located on former Union Pacific property and the […]
Ten Amazing Real Reel Places
As Sunday night’s Oscar ceremony shows, movies still have a strong power to transport us to places like mid-19th Century America in 12 Years a Slave, late 1970s New York and New Jersey in American Hustle, outer space in Gravity, and a near-future Los Angeles in Her. As impressive as those movies are in creating […]
Local Taste: Tasting Rooms in Downtowns
Over the last thirty to forty years, the United States has seen a significant geographic expansion of the beer, wine, and spirits industries. Originally limited to traditional industry centers like Kentucky, Milwaukee, the Napa and Sonoma Valleys, and St. Louis, entrepreneurs have started breweries, distilleries, and wineries in other cities, regions, and states, particularly in […]
Downtown Revitalization for Almost Free
The last five to six years have been peculiar for American downtowns. Continued evidence shows that developers, local governments, businesses, and the public have rediscovered downtowns as places to shop, work, experience culture, and live. At the same time, public revitalization efforts are becoming more difficult due to the slow pace of the economic recovery […]
Serial Vision: The Dynamic Downtown
Recently, I was walking through Downtown Jackson, a California Gold Rush town east of Stockton, when I was reminded of an urban design concept called serial vision. English architect and urban designer Gordon Cullen developed the term serial vision to describe what a pedestrian experiences when moving through a built environment. The pedestrian’s view continually […]
Types of Downtowns
In my last entry (What is a Downtown?: Changing Definitions for Changing Times), I included my definition of downtowns, which attempted to draw out the similarities between traditional and non-traditional downtowns of different shapes and sizes. While developing a single definition of a downtown provides a way to distinguish downtowns from other commercial areas, identifying […]
Recent Comments