Edition 57

The days are getting longer, there’s more opportunity for outside activities, and perhaps a little summer vaykay planning is on your mind. If so, we’ve got multiple reasons to make sure Manhattan is on your bucket list this year, along with dollar homes here and abroad, reimagining the mall for the 21st century, and celebrating women in placemaking. Don’t spend too much time reading this week’s edition of the Bulletin, and make sure you get outside to get a little direct sunlight to your eyes (just not the kind that’s coming with the eclipse)! But in prep for the big April 8th solar eclipse, you may want to read this edition’s “Share What’s Good” section, and queue up the 1984 camp classic “Night of the Comet” on streaming, kids. It’s a crazy, fun romp for spring 2024. Now where did we store those eclipse glasses?!?

Here comes the sun  🌞😎🌞,

– Your Bright Brothers Team
David Romako / Josh Yeager /  Brandi Walsh

As we close out International Women’s Month, we’d like to honor some extraordinary women who have put in the work, forwarded universal (and local) causes, and have the receipts to prove it. This considerate round-up of inspirational “femmes de pouvoir et puissance” include some of our fave names of pioneering women urbanists like Jay Pitter, Rosa Parks, Anne Hidalgo, Jane Addams and Jane Jacobs, natch — as well as some new names to us who have done or are doing impactful work in the name of us all, regardless of sex, gender, identification or orientation. #ladybosses

Photo by Lona on Unsplash
 

We ❤ a good placemaking campaign and this one takes the cake (ahem, er, the camera, as it were). A while back we reported on the Alliance for Downtown New York’s latest  residency program, as they put out a call for creatives to be named Downtown New York’s first Filmmaker in Chief. The inventive campaign serves and meets several objectives. It cements Lower Manhattan’s reputation as a palace to do business, and in particular, filmmaking. Case in point, (and full disclosure), when we were in Manhattan in December for client meetings with ADNY, we literally walked around (and amongst) the excitement of a film shoot taking place on location for what appeared to be an episode of some CSI-style TV drama. As the unofficial East Coast home to movies and TV, Manhattan has been the epicenter of visual and video media for decades. So this campaign “leans into local” and further cements that part of their brand. It also is an incredibly inventive approach to sourcing talent. Creating a residency with a “FIC”, as ADNY has done, taps into international talent and draws them to the epicenter of film and TV. And lastly, it sets the stage, as it were, to shone a spotlight on superior talent, while offering a dream set-up that includes: a generous $50,000 grant, a two-month stipend and two months of complimentary housing in a high-tech, luxury apartment Mint House, plus a professional editing suite to handle pre-production, filming on location and more. Its the chance of a lifetime, and the winners have been announced!  Drumroll, please… a HUGE round of applause for the Neymarc Brothers! This crafty fraternal duo will set up shop this summer in NYC and we cannot wait to see what they produce! Maybe it will be screened at Tribeca, Sundance or even Cannes — who can say? Collectively, this well-planned promotion is bang-on in furthering the Alliance’s branding, content strategy and placemaking efforts, and that’s award-worthy to us in any reality.

Photo by Donald Tong on Pexels

… that there’s a trend in revitalizing cities that could allow you to buy an entire house for a dollar? Whether your ideal forever home exists in Bolton Hill, Baltimore or Bella Italia — homes are on offer for a simple dollar (or a single Euro, if that’s your trading currency), and the trend has some evidence-based success stories to substantiate it. Last week, Baltimore City’s Board of Estimates voted to approve low-cost home sales as part of the city’s “Buy Into B’More” program which may now offer abandoned homes for as little as a dollar to individual buyers or community land trusts. There are over 13,000 vacant properties in Baltimore, with 900 owned by the city. And there are guardrails and requirements in place like renovating the property, moving in within a year, and staying for at least five years. But concerns about potential gentrification and pushing out existing residents also exist. Curiously, the best case use scenarios for this type of revitalization approach seem to be coming out of Europe (are you surprised?), where one-Euro homes have been on sale in depopulated towns for several years now. In one such scenario, in the picturesque mountain town of Mussomeli in the southwest of Sicily, the town launched a one-Euro program in 2017 and saw some surprising results. Not only did the depopulated town that had been struggling with outward migration since WWII sell 95% of its distressed housing stock within five years — they also experienced an astounding ten-fold explosion in tourism. So not only was the town able to stabilize and restore its at-risk housing stock, they ignited the Virtuous Cycle that now draws residents and visitors the world over. Is your city sitting on a land bank of unused properties that could be individually converted and retrofitted to foster a florid economy? Or do you think the risk of gentrification outweighs the benefits here in the US? We’d love to know your take.

Photo by Milivoj Kuhar on Unsplash

Close your eyes for a moment and see if you can imagine and remember the smell of fresh, chlorinated fountain water splashing, entrancingly down into a penny-filled pool at your feet. The hints of fragrance and aroma wafting from the GAP, Benneton or shops selling ESPRIT oversized sweaters and belts. Or the pungent whiff of “Bourbon chicken” samples being proffered up on a toothpick to passersby at the Food Court on your mission to spend, spend, spend your hard-earned teenage dollars (or parental allowance).  Now open your eyes. Where were you?  There’s a meme going around about reinventing “the mall” as senior housing for Gen X. And while we may laugh and consider which shops we’d love to live in (personally, I’d love to close my eyes at night to a virtual rainbow of glowing black light posters in the “back room” at Spencer’s Gifts circa ‘82), the mall holds a special place in American culture. Just press play on this video (and practice your upward infection while loudly exclaiming that, “Encino’s like so bitchin’!) while you read this piece about the initial intentions of the mall as the new public square (or at least a 3rd place where vital community conversations happen), and how the confluence of styles, trends and our changing relationship with retail upended those visions. It’s interesting to note that after 70 years, the mall holds new potential in many places. We’re seeing former castles to consumerism being reenvisioned to meet today’s needs. With an aging population, medical centers make sense. Adaptive re-use as centers of academia as college campuses make so much sense! And as America’s “missing middle” housing disappears, the ever-pressing need for more affordable and mid-tier housing makes so much sense for malls to find a second or third life. If your local mall contained amenities like a fitness center, pickleball, luxury apartments and an onsite hotel for your guests, would you be down?  At least install a Jamba Juice to replace that aged, dairy & egg-laden Orange Julius nastiness!

Photo by Pascal Bernardon on Unsplash

Unique, New York. If you love graphic design, history and NYC, you’re in luck. Poster House in NYC launched a gallery exhibition last week that runs through 8 September 2024, highlighting select vintage travel posters throughout the last 130+ years or so that trace the development of tourism marketing through the visual medium of travel posters from the late 19th century through to the US postwar era. As the now-perceived cultural capital of the world, NYC wasn’t always the top spot on the travel bucket lists of many in the early days. And through the curated assemblage of posters designed for airways and railways, attendees can visually trace the rise of the Manhattan skyline, along with other now-iconic attractions like Rockefeller Center, Times Square, and of course Lady Liberty herself. Nicholas Lowry, who heads up the vintage poster department for famed Swann Auction Galleries notes that, “This exhibition charts the course as New York grew into an international city,” and that’s something of interest for all arm-chair students of urban planning, tourism and placemaking, in our estimation!

Photo by Keith Walker on Unsplash

“The exciting factor about New York is the constant reinvention. Other major global cities have more tradition, but New York is the capital of dynamism,” — Nicholas Lowry, Swann Auction Galleries