Ismail Muhammad in the New York Times:
We’ve moved beyond what the magazine n+1 identified as the unadorned qualities of post-2008 cityscapes. That insubstantial, flat and gray “fast-casual modernism” is complemented by a social-media-approved cookie-cutter skin that has been thrust upon our major and midsize cities in a dismal consensus. It’s no surprise that New York is getting its very own versions of two neo-yuppie Los Angeles mainstays: the meme-ified health-food store Erewhon and the Los Feliz cafe Maru (which I love, of course). America’s two largest cities have most quickly been reshaped by the internet, succumbing to an epidemic of increasingly blank streets for the moneyed classes, the bicoastal and the terminally online people who covet luxury. It’s possible now to walk down Columbus Avenue and mistake it for Abbot Kinney in Venice Beach.
As a solution, I present a hated staple of American urban infrastructure: the strip mall.
More here.
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