Been Shopping? No, Been Shopping!

With the eagerly anticipated Return to the Outer Boroughs now less than two weeks away, I took some time earlier today to gather together a bunch of advance reader copies that had been gathering dust on the floor next to the sofa over to Housing Works Café where I knew they’d eventually find a good home. But right there on the bookcase opposite the front counter I spotted a copy of Fallingwater Rising, a “biography” of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most iconic building, by architectural historian Franklin Toker. With 16, count ’em 16, pages of color photographs. So of course I had to have me some of that, especially at half-price.

A quick browse of the outer tables also turned up Small Pieces Loosely Joined by David Weinberger, whose name turns up a lot on many of the technocultural blogs I’ve been reading of late. I’m a sucker for Internet theory and have been pretty much since I got my email account the first day of grad school, so I’m willing to spend an afternoon, probably after the Return, glancing at this. (Apparently Weinberger’s currently consulting for Howard Dean on Internet organizing, so I must have him to blame for my daily emails from Joe Trippi. Not that I’m complaining; at least the Dean campaign’s communiques don’t lapse into the whining tones all too common to MoveOn.org’s missives.)

Though I hadn’t really been intending to get anything apart from maybe some stuff on 17th-century England I’ve been wanting to read so I can better appreciate what Neal Stephenson is doing with that Baroque Cycle of his, I guess coming back with two books after getting rid of a dozen isn’t so bad, all things considered.

8 January 2004 | read this |

Read This: Engine Failure

Sorting through a batch of accumulated magazines, I read this interview with Joel Kotkin in Metropolis, which led me to track down this, which he coauthored for the Center For an Urban Future. I haven’t read the entire 40-page report yet, but this bit in the summary was worrying enough:

“9/11 also appears to be having a significant impact on the city’s ability to attract and retain two of the demographic groups that were so critical to New York’s success in the 1990s: young, educated people who moved to New York from other parts of the country and foreign-born immigrants. “

Come to think of it, relationship issues aside, I’m reasonably certain I would not have taken the plunge of moving to New York, even the outer boroughs, if I hadn’t already done so a year before 9/11. As a non-native, I’m not completely attached to the city—and, frankly, could easily see myself in, say, Seattle or Portland under the right circumstances. But it is my home for the foreseeable future, and of course one likes to see one’s home community doing well.

In all fairness, though, the summary also notes that many of NYC’s worst economic trends were already in motion well before 9/11, which functions more as a placemarker than a genuine catalyst.

6 January 2004 | read this |