Free Beer Friday Guess The City

It's Back!!1!

I'm even going to give some healthy hints because this place is so soulless and devoid of all/anything interesting that you'll need it.

In the 50s/60s, London decided, "oy, we're bloody overcrowded, mate." So they decided to build cities, aka satellite towns for residents well outside the city limits despite the fact that they just had the ish bombed out of them a decade ago and had plenty of rebuilding to do. Out to the countryside mate.

So the biggest, best, and brightest architects of the day, including one Norman Foster, were hired to concoct and construct the grandest city evar!

The following images depict the city as I know it. Meaning, as google earth represents it. Meaning, sure as sh1t looks as soulless in images as I expect it to in person. Meaning, "man, nobody seems to be in any of those pictures."

It is the perfect modernist paradigm on the level of Brasilia or Canberra. There is no connection or intermingling between various "pods" of development which exist in isolation between the transportation infrastructure which also exists only in an abstract singularity. It moves. You live over there. Grunt. Groan. Caveman club girl on head. Drag by hair.

In many ways it is the perfect modernist city. Everything is its own monoculture, streamlined, assembly lined. Modernism hates messiness. Urbanism is just too messy. So is life. So is democracy. Let's hire some starchitects. They'll design something perfect. In abstract. That ignores all surroundings. And if we're lucky, maybe they'll even make fun of us with their design. Oh how I wish I had enough money to hire a starchitect who will design a Raccoon Trap that will poke fun at all of us.

Okey doke. Guess the city either in the comments or by strolling up and yelling out the name of the city at the bar I'll be patronizing tonight, one State & Allen Lounge in uptown Dallas, with their super tasty pizza and burgers, set in the midst of one of the most walkable neighborhoods in all of Dallas:

We need sculpted people because 1) they're more perfect than real people, and 2) real people are never here...

Friday Happy Hour

Not a guess the City, but guess the bar* where I'll be at this evening:

*Not intended to be challenging

Free Beer Friday Guess the City

The Happy Hour today will be once again at the Elbow Room at the behest of the birthday girl. I think I'll be riding my bike, no promise of what time I will be arriving or departing however. Shuffleboard table awaits, indeed.

Difficult one today in my estimation.

A sleepy little village, one that might be the quintessential European mountainside hamlet occupying a hopeful portion of the neo-cortex. A place we dream of perhaps one day visiting if it indeed exists. It does, which is also why once it was rediscovered (again) by hikers during the middle of the 20th century it eventually gained in popularity amongst artists, writers, and various others in search of a temporary peace of mind in order to free that portion responsible for imagination to be set free, no longer occupied with the thoughts of whether such a place might exist.

Before that however, we must retrace the cities roots. It sprung up as a crossroads town between resource, production & manufacturing, and market as many have throughout history. In this case, an empire in search of iron for various tools of warfare and engineering. Eventually, like all empires it whithered away as its nearby resource was found more attainable elsewhere until it was found again in medieval ages where a few families existed long enough for just one elderly person to be found by the hikers, who immediately did what new, hopeful and empowered micro-empires do, they bought the place. All of it.

Fortunately, since it was so remote and isolated, lacking various infrastructure including any improvements to the nearly two millennium-old roads, still fifteen feet wide and made of stone just as they had been built, no electricity or running water beside the mountain stream running past and with little as of yet demand to add such technological pleasantries, it remained, cheap as can be. Cheap enough for artists to colonize anyway, thus making it popular and bringing it to a spec of the world's awareness where it sits, largely unchanged and fortunately not yet Disneyfied.

Perhaps to assist, these are several pages of Jane Jacobs' words, filtered and distilled through my own caustical perspective. And even if you were to find the book I am referencing here (it is one of her much lesser known), making this guess the city more difficult is that Janey was using the name of the region, not the Commune where it now houses less people than some might have graduated high school with...or at least in my case, began high school with before attrition. Who woulda thought high school was so difficult. But I digress:

If nothing else, this place represents a new world where in the age of google earth and the internet, nothing disappears...unless we want them to.















And here is a reminder: Don't be an ass this weekend.

FREE BEER FRIDAY HAPPY HOUR - GUESS THE CITY

Happy hour is at the Londoner Dallas, in the heart of the State-Thomas neighborhood in uptown. I'll arrive bespectacled in a monocle riding a unicycle. How will you get there?
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If you ever come across someone from this City, expect to hit the pub and talk politics, where you'll order a guiness and they'll grab a bud heavy and proceed to discuss who they hate more than anybody you possibly could with an exquisite singularity of vision.

As they rant, your American conscious awareness drifts from the topic at hand to beverage of choice where you are struck by the irony, apparently indicative of their strong desire to americanize.

However, like any good copycat, they sought to mimic only what we did best:

• gutting core of their City for cars by way of parking garages;
• mindless if not potentially fraudulent commercial lending;
• and a rampant building spree marked by outward and upward growth completely independent of any demand.

Despite those on-goings, the City hasn't changed enough to where you wouldn't recognize it. But, don't bother to ask how they're doing or they might ask you for some change. Where, we will then reach into our pockets, find that the bottom has been cut out, and steal their change jar before sprinting down the street, around the bend, and out of sight.

We're selling the view. Just look at it.


Of course, that view is supplied by buildings shockingly disconnected from the scale of the rest of the City. While a certain measure of real estate development is dependent upon a "visionary" intuition, it also needs to be tempered by some restraint occasionally. Or just reality. That works as well.

Joint Happy Hour - Guess the City

As you may know by now, there is a cross-town happy hour scheduled for this afternoon/evening where we join forces with FortWorthology.com in merry reverie and the promotion of walkable, bikable living in our shared metropolis.

For the full details of the excursion, train fares, schedules, etc. to Houston Street Bar and Patio in downtown Fort Worth, see this post. I'll probably be on either the 4:55 or 5:15 TRE trains to Fort Worth depending entirely upon the promptness and urgency of my travel companions (Omg, I gotta look pretty!!!!11).

You may also be aware that each time we have a happy hour, I have a post full of imagery from some mysterious city found somewhere around the globe. Your job, if you choose to accept it, is to guess what city it is (or if you want a free beer from yours truly) in the comments section of this post.

If you are beaten out by the very astute and well-traveled regular readers of this site, try the Guess the City sure to pop up at FortWorthology sometime later today. Over there the competition should be less stiff as no one has been outside of Tarrant County as the oversized belt buckles commonly found adorning our neighbors to the west have yet to successfully navigate security at DFW.

Jokes aside. Here is your wonderfully walkable Guess the City. Prepare for a tsunami of imagery as I couldn't stop exploring the City in Google Earth until Firefox said, "enough!"

Beer on me to the winner. Giddy up cowboys and cowgirls: