The Left Coast Lifter sits docked in Hudson Harbor after its trip through the Panama Canal, coming to New York from San Francisco. Nearly 30 stories tall and able to lift up to 1,900 tons, the Left Coast Lifter now waits for construction work on The New NY Bridge to begin. [Photo by Nicholas Stango]
     |
If you remember President William Henry Harrison from U.S. history class at all, then you probably remember him as the poor fellow who died from pneumonia a month after delivering his inaugural address in freezing rain. Except was it really pneumonia after all? A New York Times article suggests a different theory, and a cautionary tale against giving long speeches instead turns into one against improper sewage systems.
| |
Sprawl is inconvenient, ugly, and permanently damaging to the environment. And it can also make you sick. A new study shows that sprawling metropolitan areas not only force residents to live farther from where they work and shop, but could also be causing them to lead shorter, unhealthier lives.
| |
London’s plan to grow up might go down, Elon Musk’s quest to make electric cars cool, and funny anti-Rob Ford ads appear in Toronto. Plus: Learning from streets in Vietnam, Paris, and Manhattan. All this and more in this week’s Urban Reads.
| |
Cities change: skyscrapers go up, row houses are torn down, neighborhoods gentrify, earthquakes destroy. Vintage photographs of cities can be fascinating in and of themselves, but the familiar unfamiliarity of these time-warped photographs are especially intriguing.
| |
Airbnb announced today that it will begin charging San Francisco’s 14 percent hotel tax on reservations in the city, starting this summer. The taxes will be paid by guests. Last week, the company announced a different partnership in Portland, Oregon, where Airbnb itself will pay some city taxes.
| |
Growing outrage against the Guggenheim’s new museum in the United Arab Emirates kicked into high gear this week: Protesters stormed the Guggenheim’s New York location for a second time, and a fake website launched claiming to solicit new, "ethical" ideas for the museum’s design.
| |
After ten years of extremely expensive, slow, and politically messed up construction work–it is a long and sad story of government corruption and incompetence–Budapest, the Hungarian capital, got its fourth metro line today. Despite its ill-fated genesis and controversial usefulness, the Metro 4 is an amazing engineering, architectural, and artistic achievement, a mix of stunning concrete structures and trippy ornamentation. It looks stunning.
| |
When patience is short and waits are long, squeezing onto the bus becomes a mad, lawless scramble. And that won’t do if your buses have to transport 100,000 passengers a day, like Vancouver’s extremely busy 99 line. So transportation planners got out a camera and some tape—you can watch the results in this transfixing time-lapse video.
| |
Underground in places nobody likes to look, bacteria are doing terrible things to our sewage pipes. The concrete pipes that carry our waste are literally dissolving away, forcing engineers into a messy, expensive battle against tiny microbes.
| |
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
