More art deco than brutalism? Yes, please.

A town that has more art deco than brutalism — the largest piece of concrete in sight was a modestly sized skate park — is my kind of town. It is at once frozen in time (picture unsupervised tweens riding bicycles and scooters down a quiet tree-lined street) and progressive (in the American sense of having more crystal shops than chain stores and more rainbows than stars’n’stripes posted on storefronts). ⊕ The same cannot be said about another picture-perfect town, Frederick, which is distinctly unlike its home state of Maryland. Note, however, that only one of these two states had segregation of some kind in this century. It is also, for someone who has spent the last 12 years in the Baltimore-DC area, noticeably white, but note more so than would be expected from any place in North Carolina.[^one]

Biltmore is as impressive as you would expect a 250-room house to be, but also shows how much better our lives are compared to the richest of the early 20th century rich. Yes, your 23,000-book library with wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling bookcases is beautiful, but even a person living on the street has access to more books than that from a device in their pocket. Never mind the demands of heating, cleaning, and maintaining the beast. No wonder then that the owners turned it into an amusement park instead of continuing to live there.

A few more observations:

• Farm Burger is a Southern fast food chain a few notches above Shake Shack that in addition to pretty good beef and incredible vegan burgers also serves roasted bone marrow. The only thing missing was sweetbreads.
• There are too many hills for it to be a biking town yet there were many people on bicycles. Having mostly narrow, slow-traffic streets downtown helps.
• There are not one but two interstate highways that bisect the city, but unlike Baltimore’s idiotic I-83 that destroyed many neighborhoods and ruined the city’s walkability, there are plenty of ways to cross the I-240 on foot. Here, having hills actually helped as the highway is in many places nestled between two slopes.
• Its largest neighbors are Knoxville (approx. 2 hours away), Charlotte (same) and Atlanta (3 and a half). That is… too far away for too little, perhaps?
• But was the 7+ hour drive from DC worth it? Hell, yes.

“Seoul is not a pretty town, not at least by most Western senses of beauty. It is a sprawling mix of the haphazard, with little seeming cohesion, beyond a shared culture. Two hundred and fifty square miles of building after building, of all styles, of all facades (glass, brick, stucco, tile, fake brick, fake stucco), jammed up against each other, almost all covered in visually loud, bright, large ads.”

Seoul was never on my list of must-see places and the first paragraph of this brilliant photo essay sums up why, but the rest of the essay — and those photos! — managed to tempt me.

📷 Nature is obviously a fan of Escher.

📷 Reminds me of M.C. Escher’s Three Worlds (Tregaron Park, NW DC)

“The Cotswolds are like Disneyland, they said. And I suppose that was meant to be pejorative. But as a kid I grew up going to Disney World, over and over, … and having the time of my life.”

I like Disney World, but it looks like I would really like the Cotswolds.

📷 Seriously?

📷 It’s moments like this when I regret not having a newer phone (shot on an iPhone XS Max, 4 years old and still going strong).

📷 This is, without a doubt, the best time to visit Kenilworth aquatic gardens in DC.

American cities never stood a chance 📷