If you want to understand drone shows in Oregon, start with the Columbia River Gorge. The pressure gradient between the cool, damp Willamette Valley and the hot high desert east of the Cascades turns that canyon into a wind tunnel most summer afternoons, which is why Hood River is a world-class windsurfing town and why […]

Pennsylvania behaves like two states with a very large rural buffer in between. Philadelphia faces the Atlantic seaboard and plans events like a northeastern city. Pittsburgh faces the Ohio Valley and plans them like a midwestern one. Between them are three hundred miles of ridge and valley, farm country and small boroughs where the airspace […]

Philadelphia has something most American cities do not: a purpose-built event spine. The Benjamin Franklin Parkway runs a mile from City Hall to the Art Museum steps, lined with flags and museums, with Eakins Oval at the top as a natural stage and the whole length of it closable for a parade, a race, a […]

Portland banned consumer fireworks outright, and it did not stop at the Fourth of July. Portland Fire and Rescue prohibits the sale and use of fireworks inside city limits year-round, which in a city with 5,200 acres of forest inside its boundary is less a nanny-state flourish than a fire plan. Anyone who watched the […]

Phoenix is one of the only major American cities whose primary airport sits almost in the middle of it. Sky Harbor International is about three miles from the downtown core, wedged into the Salt River corridor between downtown and Tempe, with east-west runways that put arrivals over Tempe and departures over the west valley at […]