{"id":145,"date":"2004-02-18T07:57:32","date_gmt":"2004-02-18T12:57:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vmalt\/?p=145"},"modified":"2005-12-30T07:49:52","modified_gmt":"2005-12-30T12:49:52","slug":"the-geography-of-nowhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/the-geography-of-nowhere","title":{"rendered":"The Geography of Nowhere"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ian Frazier writes about Route 3<\/a> in the new issue of the New Yorker<\/a>:<\/p>\n

On long walks through suburbs whose names I sometimes can’t keep straight — Glen Ridge, Bloomfield, Brookside, Nutley, Passaic, Garfield, Lodi, Hasbrouck Heights, Hackensack, Teaneck, Leonia — I’ve encountered the New Jersey miscellany up close. Giant oil tanks cluster below expensive houses surrounded by hedges not far from abandoned factories with high brick smokestacks; a Spanish-speaking store that sells live chickens is near a Polish night club off a teeming eight-lane highway; a Greek church on a festival day roasts goats in fifty-five-gallon drums in its parking lot down the road from tall white Presbyterian churches that were built when everything around was countryside. Neighborhoods go from fancy to industrial to shabby without apparent reason, and you can’t predict what the next corner will be.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Funny thing is, I had the same sensation of unpredictability when I was wandering Paris in October 2002.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ian Frazier writes about Route 3 in the new issue of the New Yorker: On long walks through suburbs whose names I sometimes can’t keep straight — Glen Ridge, Bloomfield, Brookside, Nutley, Passaic, Garfield, Lodi, Hasbrouck Heights, Hackensack, Teaneck, Leonia — I’ve encountered the New Jersey miscellany up close. Giant oil tanks cluster below expensive … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Geography of Nowhere”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-suburbs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-2l","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1479,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/good-design-bad-cities","url_meta":{"origin":145,"position":0},"title":"“Good design” = bad cities","author":"Gil","date":"April 27, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"I meant to post this James Lileks bleat a while ago. He engaged in some \"wretched, slanted cherry-picking of selected quotes\" from a newspaper interview with professor Thomas Fisher, the dean of University of Minnesota's new School of Design. The interview discusses \"the Design Economy,\" and Lileks uses some of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Architecture"","block_context":{"text":"Architecture","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/architecture"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":927,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/more-on-jacobs","url_meta":{"origin":145,"position":1},"title":"More on Jacobs","author":"Gil","date":"April 27, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Witold Rybczynski at Slate has a brief appreciation of Jane Jacobs's work. He points out that Jacobs largely ignored the suburbs, which is putting it mildly. In her best-known book, she considers them solely as a negative, the way most urban theorists do. Which reminds me that I need to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1603,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/getaway","url_meta":{"origin":145,"position":2},"title":"Getaway","author":"Gil","date":"July 26, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Work is under control: the July\/August issue landed on my desk yesterday, the Top Companies report's website is live, our conference enrollment is rolling along, and our September issue looks like it'll be a big one. So I'm taking a vacation day! I'm heading down to Philly to visit a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Art"","block_context":{"text":"Art","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/art"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":509,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/end-of-day","url_meta":{"origin":145,"position":3},"title":"End of day","author":"Gil","date":"March 8, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"","rel":"","context":"In "suburbs"","block_context":{"text":"suburbs","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/suburbs"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3819,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/think-pink","url_meta":{"origin":145,"position":4},"title":"Think Pink","author":"Gil","date":"April 19, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the best photos I've ever taken. Enjoy:","rel":"","context":"In "suburbs"","block_context":{"text":"suburbs","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/suburbs"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4464,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/airbus","url_meta":{"origin":145,"position":5},"title":"Airbus","author":"Gil","date":"September 14, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Here's a picture from the bus-stop around 6:30 a.m., after I dropped my wife off.","rel":"","context":"In "suburbs"","block_context":{"text":"suburbs","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/suburbs"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}