Austin has grown fast, but it has grown from a tiny urban core — meaning that we have less pre-World War II buildings than probably any other city our size in the South. Many neighborhoods quite close to downtown were developed in the 1960’s or later — the city basically ended 3 miles in each direction until 1960. This means you can live in verdant, “The Wonder Years”-esque suburbia and still be downtown in 15 minutes.
I stumbled upon ..read more
Oklahoma City, a place I have never visited as an adult until yesterday, was always just a placeholder in my mind — where my great aunts live(d), a prairie town eager to be a metropolis, an awkward entity in a number of ways (a city located in a state where cities are despised as saltmills for the liberal and heathens of the world). Of my native-born extended family, this is the city where most of them have lived. ..read more
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I am heading to San Antonio to visit some relatively distant …relatives. To be more precise, Boerne. I haven’t any clue what Boerne is like, only that it seems to be a rather conservative escape conduit for upper-middle-class white people who feel the need to vacate San Antonio. Either way, family is family, and I haven’t seen these folks in at least 5 years, maybe as long as 9 or 10 years. That means I might shave my ..read more
