James S. Russell

New York subway delays became epidemic this summer and emergency repairs at Penn Station snarled commuter traffic. A recent column by the NYT’s Michael Kimmelman ruminated on these transit woes and . . . Brexit. The column looked at London’s Crossrail—a $20-billion expansion of the city’s crowded transit system that is a heroic feat of engineering and said to be the largest infrastructure project in Europe. It’s an important story for Americans, who simply cannot competently build complex … [Read more...]

First it was billionaires. Now the so-called Creative Class and its Millennial progeny are deemed responsible for The New Urban Crisis, which is what Creative Class guru Richard Florida has dubbed enormous inequality in cities, the concentration of extreme poverty, and the tsunami of gentrification that displaces lower-income people. (His book by that name, which I have read about—but want to read—arrives in April.) Is there a New Urban Crisis? No. Though income inequality permeates the … [Read more...]

At the beginning of summer, when people head to carefree destinations, I went to …. Atlantic City. That's where four of the 12 ocean-front casinos went bankrupt in 2014 leaving thousands of empty hotel rooms and acres of abandoned gaming space. The city itself has been on the brink of insolvency since at least 2010. Economic-development officials turn to gambling as an economic quick-fix, even as Atlantic City has for decades been the poster child of gaming-industry failure. Atlantic City was … [Read more...]

Zaha Hadid was indomitable, tough, blunt, and pugnacious. You did not want to be on the receiving end of her withering tongue. Her abundant critics said she was an insatiable egoist, inflicting her personal vision—heedless of budget and context. Her projects asserted the primacy of form over operational convenience or easy maintenance. Though she is (incredibly!) the first woman since the professionalization of architecture to reach the pinnacle of architectural fame entirely on her own—with … [Read more...]