Comments on: Purple Haze: 119th Street Town Center http://irishkc.com/purple-haze-119th-street-town-center.htm Kansas City Irish Festivals, Music, Pubs, & Events by an Artist in Ireland Sat, 26 May 2012 12:27:34 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5 By: Laura Capellaro http://irishkc.com/purple-haze-119th-street-town-center.htm#comment-285390 Laura Capellaro Sun, 25 Apr 2010 13:58:06 +0000 http://irishkc.com/index.php/purple-haze-119th-street-town-center.htm#comment-285390 Brilliant post. I can imagine you becoming more and more stubbornly determined to acquire purple socks, continually flying in the face of whatever new adversity The American Shopping Experience threw at you. It strikes me that cities that grew up all at once can sometimes be like the shopping mall you describe. For example, Milton Keynes in the UK. Maybe America was always so frantic to try and catch up with Europe that it built many of it's cities all in a rush? So places never had the chance to evolve in quite the same way as, say, Bruges or Genoa or Nice or Bilbao. Maybe the geography of Kansas (mainly flat, isn't it?) also meant that no great deal of ingenuity was ever needed by city planners in order to "make the best use of space" - as in New York, say - or "take into account natural features" - as in San Francisco. So you end up with modular, and sprawling, and uniform. Brilliant post. I can imagine you becoming more and more stubbornly determined to acquire purple socks, continually flying in the face of whatever new adversity The American Shopping Experience threw at you.

It strikes me that cities that grew up all at once can sometimes be like the shopping mall you describe. For example, Milton Keynes in the UK. Maybe America was always so frantic to try and catch up with Europe that it built many of it’s cities all in a rush? So places never had the chance to evolve in quite the same way as, say, Bruges or Genoa or Nice or Bilbao.

Maybe the geography of Kansas (mainly flat, isn’t it?) also meant that no great deal of ingenuity was ever needed by city planners in order to “make the best use of space” - as in New York, say - or “take into account natural features” - as in San Francisco. So you end up with modular, and sprawling, and uniform.

]]>