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"This year's list was more difficult than usual to create. The number of high-quality, intellectually-stimulating books that we received seemed to be much higher than in previous years. With a plethora of excellent books to choose from, we feel confident that our selections will engage, delight and/or outrage anyone who is interested in urban design, landscape architecture, transportation, and the larger umbrella of urban planning".
Interesting...adding a few things to my Amazon wish list! "Naked City" and the "Sprawl Repair Manual" look particularly interesting, and as a fan of Harvey Molotch, "Toilet" is probably going to end up on my bookshelf at some point. And I'm most curious about that book on Fulton Mall, even though it's not about the same "Fulton Mall" I thought it was at first (there is one in Fresno and one in New York.)
And I'm most curious about that book on Fulton Mall, even though it's not about the same "Fulton Mall" I thought it was at first (there is one in Fresno and one in New York.)
Didn't know there was also a Fulton Street pedestrian mall in Fresno.
The Fulton Street pedestrian mall is interesting, I read a bit about it on the internet and have walked through it several times. It's in Downtown Brooklyn. Downtown Brooklyn suffered a double whammy of suburbanization and white flight and being next to a much larger downtown district (Manhattan south of 59th street; though downtown in the Manhattan context is usually more as a cardinal direction). Closest west coast match would be Downtown Oakland and San Francisco, but they have more distance between them.
The Fulton Street Mall is open only to buses and delivery vehicles, in some ways it looks more like a regular road than a typical pedestrian mall. Opened sometime in the late 60s or 70s as a way to stem the decline. A study at the time found most visitors to the area didn't drive anyway, so closing it to car traffic should do little harm to businesses. By retail square footage (2 million square feet) it's similar to a large mall, and does very well on a retail sales per square foot basis. But the shops are a bit low-end, and the shoppers are mostly poorer and black. A bit strange because most of the neighborhoods to the south and west are well-off and white (and were white back in the 70s), black areas are mostly to the east. I assume the local white residents go to Manhattan (only a couple miles away) to shop. So some of the upper-middle class white residents think the Fulton Street Mall is need of improvement with "better" shops and the pedestrian mall hasn't done as well as it should have. No push to reopen the streets to full car traffic, at least.
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