If you have ever landed at San Diego International, you already understand the city’s central aviation fact. Jets come down the Laurel Street corridor low enough over Bankers Hill that passengers can read rooftop air conditioning units, because the runway starts almost immediately after Balboa Park and the terrain leaves no room for a shallow […]
San Francisco’s Fourth of July fireworks are, in a normal year, almost entirely invisible. The fog comes through the Golden Gate in the evening, settles over the northern waterfront, and the city spends twenty minutes listening to detonations it cannot see. Everybody knows this and the show happens anyway. It is the clearest possible illustration […]
There is a reason downtown San Jose has no skyline. Mineta San José International sits about two miles from City Hall, and its approach path runs straight over the center of the city, so building heights downtown are capped far below what a city of a million people would otherwise build. That one fact tells […]
Seattle is a city where the sky is genuinely hard to use. Sea-Tac throws a Class B shelf over most of the metro. Boeing Field sits wedged underneath it. Renton Municipal is at the south end of Lake Washington next to a 737 plant. And then there are the floatplanes, which operate out of South […]
Charleston wrote the first historic district zoning ordinance in the United States in 1931, and the Board of Architectural Review it created has been saying no to things on the peninsula ever since. Ninety miles up the coast, Myrtle Beach runs one of the densest tourist economies on the Atlantic seaboard and packs most of […]