Busy week; I just started a new job that had me down for a training meeting in Atlanta. Well, not Atlanta, but whatever you call the amalgamation of hotels, restaurants, and convention centers around the airport. I’ve been reading a few books by contemporary urbanists that describe the shift towards development around airports — we always build cities around transportation hubs, and airports today play the role that marine ports played in previous centuries. What you see sprouting up around the Atlanta airport is not sustainable and depends on cars. I’d be curious to see an example of high-density, walkable mixed-use development around an airport. There is the noise issue, however…hm. A broader question: how long will airports be the primary transportation hub — what will replace them?

Back home in Manhattan, I’ve been exploring my neighborhood. It is immensely satisfying to just walk around the city and take in the peoplescape. Boredom is impossible here — just go on a walk and you’re encountering something interesting. The other night, I was sitting at the bar at Dojo, reading, when a fellow came in looking for directions to a pizza place. I used my phone to find the details, but we struck up a conversation and ended up talking for four hours. He has lived in Soho since the 70s and has a wealth of stories about that neighborhood’s heyday. He was adamant that I get out and familiarize myself with NYC’s art galleries (I have not done the best job at this yet), and he wrote down a list of recommended places for me to get started at, all located down in the Lower East Side.

At one point he pulled out a puzzle that he told me he had invented: a plastic square, perhaps 2″ x 2″, with a slot on either end. You slide a metal rod into one side, and then attempt to make your way out the other side by moving it through a maze. I was able to solve it fairly quickly, but he flipped it over to the reverse side and asked me to try it. This maze was a lot more difficult. He said I need to be in a “zen state” and not to try to force it through, but I couldn’t get it. He tried it himself, and he wasn’t able to solve it either. Perhaps he was just being nice.

I wake up in the mornings to the sound of pigeons. I didn’t know what they were when I first moved into this place, and was initially annoyed by the sound — the area right outside my bedroom window appears to be a major pigeon congregation zone. I’ve come to enjoy the sound; the fluttering of their wings is relaxing. And the .. I don’t even know what to call it .. cooing? .. sound that they make. It’s like .. when someone thinks something is interesting, and they make an “mmMMmm” sound that rises and falls in pitch. A plesant urban soundtrack.