December 19, 2006
Morrone's NY Lists: Top 10 pedestrian annoyances
Historian, lecturer and architectural biographer of Manhattan and Brooklyn, Francis Morrone returns to NewYorkology with another installment of his occasional series of lists about New York City. Today's screed is especially appropriate for the holiday gridlock on the streets, and sidewalks, of New York.
Top 10 Pedestrian Annoyances
1. Cellphone weavers. Something about talking on a cellphone makes most people incapable of walking in a straight line.
2. People who not only don't walk on the right, but seem aggressively not to do so.
3. People who haul those suitcase-on-wheels things behind them.
4. People who wield outsize "golf umbrellas" on city streets.
5. People who refuse to take off their backpacks when they ascend crowded public stairways.
6. People who walk their dogs on extra-long retractable leashes.
7. Aggressive stroller-pushers. In Park Slope, Brooklyn, where years of fertility treatments often yield twins, the extra-wide strollers are a special menace. And what's with the violently aerodynamic design of modern strollers, anyway? And … what's with pushing your four-year-old in a stroller?
8. The shopping mall gait, i.e., the shambling two- , three- , or four-abreast waddle.
9. The iPod wearer who does not hear "excuse me."
10. People who walk with their rolled-up umbrellas parallel, rather than perpendicular, to the ground.
Yes, this is a snarky list. But it is the result of close observation of the breakdown in the past few years of the most elemental rules of city behavior. Cities thrive on the thousand tacit obeisances to other bodies. The vibrant street life described by Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte is no longer. "Insulate, insulate," was the motto of Tom Wolfe's Masters of the Universe in "The Bonfire of the Vanities." Portable technology has made that dream possible for everyone.
Earlier: Morrone List No 1: Eight Myths about New York
December 19, 2006 09:08 AM in Architecture, Transportology
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