The originals

Richard Price's history of the NYC Housing Authority:

In most housing projects these days, a hard-times hidden economy thrives, what Mark Jacobson and others call the gray market, consisting of improvised and in some cases ingenious ways of making ends meet—apartments doubling as daycare centers, some licensed, some not; takeaway lunches sold out the door or lowered from the window; a legion of bootleg car mechanics whose garage is the street; come-to-your-house handymen, plumbers, carpenters, computer programmers, and repairmen; just-text-me drivers for hire; CD and DVD duplicators leaving for the commercial strips of Fordham Road, Harlem, and elsewhere; wholesale candy hustlers, kids mostly, heading out to Grand Central Station, Penn Station, and tourist-centric Times Square, introducing themselves as grassroots fundraisers in order to sell ten-cent chocolate bars for two dollars a pop, a 2,000 percent markup.

Catch-up

Looking at my calendar is inducing a feeling of mild awe at the amount of stuff I have to do in the next couple weeks (i.e. before I leave Nov. 1 for some days with B.)! It includes recreational elements as well as just work (Tough Mudder this Saturday, tickets for the Adès Tempest at the Met next Saturday evening, a day-long meditation retreat the following day) but there is no doubt that the season of letters of recommendation is upon us....

Heard a fantastically good talk at lunchtime today at the Society of Fellows. David Russell on George Eliot's rage - excellent stuff!

Tyler Hamilton's book really is unbelievably gripping. I couldn't put it down. Strongly recommended.

Miscellaneous other links:

Swim to work!

Cupcake aversion therapy?

Self-regulating schemes

At the FT, Sam Knight follows one of London's bikes-for-hire for a day (site registration required). It is an interesting piece throughout, and this fellow sounds delightful:

The scheme itself has its headquarters on Penton Street, near King’s Cross railway station, in an old taxi depot, where I met Nick Leigh, the gap-toothed and optimistic Serco manager in charge. In the corner of his office was a whiteboard covered in equations and hand-drawn graphs attacking the logistical quandaries of the machines. “The scribblings of a madman,” he said. On paper, Leigh explained, London’s cycle system was only going to need a fleet of 14, non-polluting electrical buggies called “Alkis” to supplement the random movement of bikes across the city, chiefly by dealing with the inevitable daily tide of bikes washing in from the edge of zone one and back out again. But it has not worked out like that.

“I think we believed there would be more natural redistribution than maybe there is,” said Leigh. The Alkis are currently off the roads, unable to take the workload, and have been replaced by 18 less green cars and vans. The main force that Serco has to contend with are the commuters, who tend to ride the bikes in straight lines from the stations to the City and back again. As a result, Serco has recently had to rent storage space at King’s Cross, Waterloo and Holborn to avoid the dreaded sin of “double-handling” – ferrying the same bikes twice in the same day. When I asked Leigh whether he thought the bikes would be ever able to flow without any intervention at all, he looked wistful. “I have dreamed of lots of things,” he said, “but not self-regulated schemes.”

"The dog marriage season"

Suzanne Sternthal on Moscow's stray dog population (FT site registration required).

Manhattan paleolimnography

Geoff Manaugh on urban puddles.

"Always Hot Always Ready"

At the Sunday Times, John Carey reviews Philip Davies' Lost London 1870-1945:

The late-19th century was the heyday of ornamental sign-writing, before the advent of neon, and the hand-painted signs covering every shopfront appeal to all possible shades of public interest — those who wish to keep up appearances (“Gentlemen’s Hats Polished for Sixpence”), the desperate (“Hammer Guns and Automatic Pistols Bought, Sold and Exchanged”), the hopeful (“Our Noted Lucky Wedding Rings”) and the moribund (“Funerals To Suit All Classes”). Sunlight soap and Colman’s blue and starch are advertised even in blackest Bermondsey, which suggests that poverty did not necessarily mean dirt. The constant advertisements for patent medicines are a reminder that the average age of death in the East End in 1900 was 30, and 55% of children died before they were five. Signs outside eating-houses indicate keen competition. For fourpence you can get a rasher of bacon and two eggs in a coffee shop near the Tower, or a pint of tea, two slices of bread and a plate of cold meat in Borough High Street. Harris’s restaurant in Aldgate offers pork sausages with bread (“Always Hot Always Ready”) for twopence.

The swans of North America

At Triple Canopy, Dan Torop's virtual Bowery (via The Rumpus.)

"I like the cut of your J.I.B."

At the FT, Michael Moorcock on lost Londons (site registration required).

The rose of Texas

Ring roads of the world (via strange maps).

Treacle Mine Road

British town 'twinned' with Discworld capital Ankh-Morpork - and a fuller account at the Independent.

(NB photo accompanying second story makes me feel I must adopt a more striking style of authorial dress.)

"Everything painted in a colour we might call Dark Underbelly"

Rachel Cooke interviews Iain Sinclair for the Observer.

A storey and a half a week

The Woolworth Building and other monuments of urban planning.