Upzoned
Last week, we heard how DC's outdoor dining regulations threaten local businesses. Today, urban designers Abby Newsham and Edward Erfurt explore how DC could course-correct. They share creative ways that cities can maintain safety while supporting local businesses and even improving the design of their streets.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
This is Abby, and you are listening to Upzoned.
Hey everyone, thanks for listening to another episode of Upzoned, a show where we take a big story from the news each week that touches the Strong Towns conversation, and we upzone it: We talk about it in depth. My name is Abby Newsham, I'm in Kansas City, and I am here today with Edward Erfurt, who is the Chief Technical Advisor with Strong Towns. Hello, Edward, welcome.
Hey, Abby, thanks for having me.
Yeah, it's always great to have you on. You brought a great article that I'm really excited to talk about with you today that is on the topic of streeteries. So for anybody who doesn't know what a streatery is, they're also sometimes called parklets, and these are areas that restaurants have utilized, particularly after the pandemic, that used to be on-street parking and have now been converted into outside dining space. So Washington DC, like many cities, has initiated a program like this so that restaurants can allow people to eat outside, especially during the pandemic. It's now been five years since the beginning of the pandemic, if you can believe that, and DC is now transitioning from a pilot program into a permanent one, with new rules and fees.
The rules are really intended to address concerns around safety and aesthetics, and the fees are really intended to address private use of public space and application review costs, as well as the potential to rent some supplies like jersey barriers from the city if the restaurant can't supply their own. So there's a lot of new fees associated with this program, and some restaurants are really concerned about these new costs and standards, saying that they may overshadow the benefit of participation. Some restaurants are even warning that the new plan could not just hurt their business, but actually eliminate jobs and lead to the closure of restaurants that rely on streeteries for survival, even though the pandemic has ended.
So this is really interesting. If you want to read more about this, this particular article is in The Washington Post. It's titled, "After five years, DC streeteries hit with higher costs and more rules." I actually have some experience working with what we call a parklet program in my neck of the woods, and working with restaurants and standards on this. So I'm excited to talk about this one. There's a lot of nuance in these parklet or streatery programs, and how you actually get them from a pilot to a program that I'd love to dive into. I think I'll leave it there, because I'd love to hear your initial reaction, Edward, to this article. How are you thinking about it?
Yeah, when I saw this article, I just thought about how top-down this is and how wrong-headed it is for the city. I would expect this out of any big city. I should not be surprised this is coming out in DC. But when I think about the lowest bar of entry that we could have in our cities to increase floor space, eyes on the street, activation of public space, something as simple as a cafe table with two chairs is the lowest bar that we should be able to do. I get what the district is struggling with. They're in a budget crunch. They have put in such a complicated system with so many steps in it and so many hands involved in it that they've got to recoup those costs, because they have not just staff time but they also have hard costs.
It just spirals out of control. I really feel for these small businesses, because the amount of turnover on these tables is an enormous amount of revenue for the restaurant, and ultimately revenue for Washington DC. But the barrier they're putting in front of it from a city level really makes this not just a wash, but a loss for anybody that wants to participate.
I very much agree with that perspective on why parklet programs or streatery programs are incredibly valuable, not just for individual business owners, but also for enhancing the public realm and giving up space that was dedicated to cars and making them spaces for people. I do want to talk a little bit about the flip side of why I think it still makes sense to have some kind of guidance for implementing parklet programs.
I hear the planner coming out of you.
So the reason I want to get into this is because I worked, I won't say what city, but I did work with a downtown community that did a pilot program for what they call parklets, and they have an amazing small business community. Because it was COVID, they basically didn't have any standards. They said, "Do whatever you want, and we'll put up a bunch of orange jersey barriers from public works. What's the worst that can happen?" So there's a lot of cool stuff that came out of that. I think there's value to doing a pilot program that way and just letting people do things. I think when they eventually developed their long-term program, there were things that they allowed that I think if they were to talk about it conceptually, they would have been too afraid to allow.
Like one restaurant took a bunch of reclaimed brick pavers and made that the base of their parklet, and it was super cool. If a bunch of planners and policy people got together and conceptualized that as an idea, they probably would have said, "Drainage concerns, let's not do that," or they would have come up with a reason to not do it.
So I think it's good to do pilots and to try things. But there are real issues. One of my first things was to take pictures of all the parklets and spend time trying to understand what the issues were. Then I talked with businesses and people and spent a lot of time identifying this. There are access issues. There was one parklet where they put their platform not flush with the curb but like two feet up off the curb. Then they did this super steep ramp that you could never actually go up if you were in a wheelchair. Then they put a table in front of it, so you can't even access it using the ramp. You have to step up onto it. Then they put no railing around it. So it was basically this huge stage, and it was a bar, so it was super dangerous.
There were other people who were plugging into the city's public electricity and using it for lighting. There were some people who had wires on the ground or above the sidewalk, and people were running into it. There were some people who had about ten heat lamps—gas-powered heat lamps—in their parklet, and it was killing the trees. There are these random restaurant things that just need to be addressed.
Yeah, restaurant tours were always at the top of our city code enforcement list. They would do things in the middle of the night. A restaurant only makes money if people are eating at tables, so when they need to do a renovation, they get really innovative in how they would do their renovations so they're shut down the least amount of time. They're in a cash business. So the fact that they would go and pay somebody up front—I found all the creative things. I totally agree with you. The things we saw in my community when people started doing the parklet stuff, the bubblegum and duct tape would have been an upgrade to some of the things we saw.
Yeah, but there's also really cool things that people do. The reaction we're seeing to things that are ultimately basic code compliance issues—ADA, fire, utility access, basic construction quality—if you build the railings strong enough you don't have to have jersey barriers everywhere. DC has decided they need to have jersey barriers all over the place. I'm thinking, just design a slow street where people want to be and people aren't speeding, and have stronger walls.
There's value to having some very basic standards. However, there's a very important conversation about the fees that you are charging for people to participate in a program like this, and how the standards are creating cost expectations for actually building out a parklet. Is this a five-thousand-dollar investment by a restaurant? Is it a fifty-thousand-dollar investment? The restaurants are benefiting by expanding their table space, so there's a benefit to that. But if the standards are so strict that it doesn't make sense to participate in something like this, then you're just not going to get any streeteries, and it's pointless to have the program. It will only happen with the nicest restaurants.
With the nicest restaurants that will build the ultimate beautiful buildout, or the pizza joint that's going to build it on a shoestring budget and just accept a bunch of ticket citations until it's too much of a pain. You'll never get that middle ground, and you'll lose all the innovative things we saw early on in the pandemic.
When I looked at the DC thing, I actually went to their manual. When the pandemic happened in my community, I wrote a manual, and we had three objectives in that manual. The first was to let everybody know that you were allowed to have outdoor dining. People didn't believe that that was in our ordinances, so we needed to show people they could do that. It was like an encouragement from the city to say, you're allowed to do this. We'd love to see it happen.
The second was to inspire you. Where do these go? There's right and wrong places they could go. In a parking lot, where could it go? On certain streets, where would it go? We're kind of sharing that catalog of images. In 2020 there were very few people that had that image in their mind. Now we have lots of pieces.
The third thing we did, which goes to some of the basic regulatory components, is that we wanted to make sure there was a clear space to meet ADA, so that on a sidewalk you weren't just overwhelming the sidewalk. People would be able to walk easily on the sidewalk without interruption. I've seen these kind of parklets in some cities where the dining tables push up against the restaurant and they make the pedestrians walk way out to the edge. In others, they put the sidewalk up against the windows of the buildings and they push the tables out to the edge.
I have my own personal opinion. I like having people walk through the tables, because that's part of it. If you go to fun, exciting outdoor dining areas, that's the experience. You're out on the street. The other thing is that all these places, if it's a cold night or rainy day, if I can get people close to the windows, that's the best billboard. Happy people, steamy, warm food that looks good inside. We don't have to look across vacant tables. We can just see inside the restaurant and think, hey, this is someplace I want to dine.
We had to set those pieces up so that there were basic standards. We could meet safety. We could also meet sanitary conditions so trash wasn't dumped out on the street. We had to inform restaurants that used our public trash cans that that shouldn't be for restaurant trash. If they were going to do that, we needed to work with them to coordinate who would pick up that trash. We would only come around once a week to empty the city trash cans, but a restaurant would fill it in a night. So we needed to bag it up, put it in a dumpster, and work together. We need some basic rules that everybody can equally follow.
But what I see here in DC is my question: Are we making the rules so complicated and the process so long that it's resulting in these unintended consequences, or are the people just so unaware of how to do this stuff that we're going to charge them out so they opt not to do it?
That's a really good question: Are they getting rid of the program by establishing the long-term program that nobody wants to participate in? I feel like this happens all the time with zoning, whether intentional or not. How you set the standards needs to consider multiple different types of participants. It's very unfair to have a standard that basically favors the nicest restaurants that can afford to build to the standards and excludes all of the small business, pizza shop restaurants. That's not a fair application of the rules.
I think that's a very healthy way to look at these kinds of programs to make sure you're treating restaurants all the same and regulating things that really matter. As I was exploring this many years ago, I collected all of the parklet programs I could find and made this giant spreadsheet. I love Excel. I made a giant spreadsheet of what people are regulating all across the country, so that I could see where is the heat—where everyone regulates this. Then what are the weird things where only two cities cared about this issue and it's not normal to regulate? I think that's important.
What was typically regulated was ADA compliance, fire safety, maintenance—whoever has the parklet, how are they maintaining it? There were sight-line issues and how you deal with perimeter buffers, reflective tape stuff like that. There's very basic standards that I think any restaurant could reasonably meet, and it doesn't cost that much to meet it. But it starts to get into, especially the issue of seasonality, which was brought up in this article. People want these to be seasonal, which means you would have to break down this whole thing every season and then build it back up, which I think is not very reasonable.
Materials, the process, and the fees can really make these programs very expensive depending on what you're regulating. I think that's really important. It's about identifying the basic life safety issues.
I experienced that up in Medicine Hat—okay, green the Action Lab. It's in Alberta, and they get winters, so people don't want to dine outside in the winter. In a rational sense, the city said, "Okay, we're going to build these," and they would do the wooden platforms that were equal with the street or the curb. So it was really nice. They would build these out. Then in the fall, they would require all the restaurants to take them apart and put them away for winter.
When you would look at these restaurants, where do they store all these extra tables and this giant wooden deck that was out in the street? It created all this other mess.
If a city wants to do that, then they may as well design and fabricate modular platforms that the city leases. They come set it up for you, and then they break it down. Rather than putting it on the restaurants to do that, I don't think it makes sense to put it on the restaurants to design modular components that they have to hire people to break down and set up and then store.
Because it'll be the wait staff and the dishwasher putting it together. The least qualified. They may know how to fix the light bulb or get the oven running in the restaurant, but we're not going to ask them to go out and build this. It's going to be an hourly tip wage.
But the other thing I saw with this is that what we're missing in the whole discussion—and this is where I think DC really misses the point—is that this outdoor area is the first level. This is the first increment of an investment. Let's just assume they're saying a 35-mile-per-hour street speed or less outside of the two freeways through DC. You can't go very fast on any of those streets that are going to have this outdoor dining. They're all really old, narrow streets. So then they put up a giant jersey barrier, and they train everybody that there's no longer parking there, or the extra asphalt is being transformed to something else.
What I would be interested in is just reinforcing the idea of increment. We're going to do the wooden temporary thing. We're going to see if that works in this neighborhood. Does traffic fall apart? Because that's what I hear many times. We're going to take away a lane that's going to impede all the traffic, or we're going to remove parking, and nobody will be able to get to our neighborhood because we don't have the three parking spaces in front of our business. I hear that nobody will eat outside because of weather or climate or culture. But all these things start to happen.
The amount of money they're spending on the jersey barriers and concrete barriers—costs just to install that before you even put the tables—is like a minimum of about forty-five hundred dollars. If you're going to do that every year, what is that next increment? Okay, we first start with the outdoor dining with the step down on the curb. We're just going to put it on the asphalt. Then our next experience is going to be that we'll put in the raised patio space and we'll put in a barrier so that's like a little semi-permanent.
Then the next piece to it will be that we actually build out the curb. We actually reclaim the street for a wider sidewalk. That is something lasting in the neighborhood that today may be outdoor dining, but in the future it might just be public open space.
I think that's brilliant, because back in May, I went to DC to go to the NACTO conference, and I went on a streatery walking tour and I saw a bunch of these streeteries. They're built out and they're operating pretty well. Your point about this next increment, making this go from a pilot to a permanent program, it ought to involve the city instead of putting it on the business owners to follow these standards and build to the standards.
Why don't we just redesign this street as the next increment and shift the curbs? It is the public realm, after all. It's our public streetscapes. The success of streeteries is an invitation for cities to seriously look at moving where their curb is and building these as extended sidewalk areas, and then letting restaurants put tables out into these extended sidewalk areas. I think that may be the real answer here. The next increment is actually just redesigning the street completely in these areas where they want this to happen, rather than trying to build out all these different designs and have restaurants pay a fee.
Just extend the sidewalk, make it a 30-foot sidewalk, and let people put tables and chairs out there.
Somebody's going to say, I just know, because we're Strong Towns and we're trying to think about finances of cities, "Well, who's going to pay for that?" Here's what my response is: When we look at incremental development, incremental growth in our cities, incremental improvements, when you think about these tables going out onto the sidewalk and into the street, each one of those tables is generating revenue for the business and the city. Each of those is stabilizing those businesses.
There's some rules in all of these sorts of ordinances that if you have 35 feet of shop frontage, you can have 35 feet of outdoor dining. If you go to Miami Beach, here's the secret, and I only know this because I went to school down there and experienced all this. Very few restaurants out on Ocean Drive—the most iconic street in America with all the deco buildings and all that fancy outdoor dining—I think there is only one kitchen on that entire block. Food is actually prepared two blocks away, and they bus it across the street for that outdoor dining.
So the restaurants are only leasing the porches and the sidewalk area to be on the most glamorous street in America to have outdoor dining, and the cooking is occurring where the real estate's a little bit less, where the actual restaurant is located. So in these areas, if maybe in the mid-block we can't do the outdoor dining because there's hydrants or some sort of drainage piece, but everywhere we daylight an intersection—meaning we put a little space where a pedestrian crossing is—or every area where we want to put an extended curb out to optically narrow the street, we should allow those to kind of be open and let the restaurants figure out how to move there, but not be restricted to that spot that generates wealth in those areas.
We can map that. We can't map it by restaurant, but we can map it by areas. If you see that you've allowed for outdoor dining, you can count how many we have. We can see what the growth of taxes coming in on those. Yes, totally. Point to that to say, look here, we're going to make an investment. We're going to kind of acknowledge we have a growth in our revenue over the next couple of years. We're going to reinvest that amount on our streets, and we're going to perpetuate this into the future.
Because here's the other beautiful thing with it: We're taking unproductive space, extra asphalt that requires lots of maintenance and upkeep, and we're converting it to a productive space that we can allow entrepreneurship to occur and people to gather. In DC, it's an urban area. It's all about meeting folks and engaging in politics and lobbying. Instead of doing it in a dark corner of a restaurant, let's do it out on the street. Let's make it visible for all. Convert our unproductive, highest-liability infrastructure into something that's productive, that encourages more small businesses to emerge.
There's so much about what you just said that is brilliant. First of all, I love the idea of a lot of restaurants being able to share a kitchen. Imagine if you just have one big commercial kitchen where many different restaurants could share a hood and grease trap and all this expensive infrastructure and run their restaurants in a way that is just more affordable. That's such a huge barrier to opening a restaurant—building out those spaces. So that, to me, is very interesting. It really made me think about that. I can't remember the name of this restaurant, and I think it may be referenced in this article, but there's one streatery in DC that takes up tons of space. It's a huge street. It's like 12 parking spaces or something. It's an enormous streatery, and it's taking up a huge portion of the block.
It goes back to parking and then down the block there's another one. I feel like that would be the perfect block for them to just come in and say, "Hey, we're getting rid of parking on this side of the street. We're extending the curb, and we're just going to make it a consistent, extended sidewalk cafe area. You guys can just use it, go to town, use this area." Because to your point about who's going to pay for it, what's the benefit here? It does result in tax revenue. This article talks numbers and talks about some of the revenue that just one restaurant generates for the city just as a result of this parklet program or streatery program. So there's a real benefit there and a real value-capture mechanism opportunity that could help to pay for this kind of thing.
But I think a lot of the politics around streeteries and parklets comes down to it fundamentally coming down to the fact that we're putting the onus of designing these spaces onto the restaurants. We're over-engineering these programs to try to avoid the worst-case scenario. If the cities just came in and just designed the public realm in a way that supports cafe dining, which isn't that complex, but if we just designed our streetscapes to support that and just made a decision that, hey, it makes more sense to have streeteries here, we're going to make this whole sidewalk dining, we're not going to have parking here, it doesn't need to be as complicated.
I think where these have been really successful, it's kind of begging cities to take that next step, to change the streetscape.
Cities are so adverse to failure. They're so concerned these things are going to fail. I've talked to many technical staff at City Hall, and they would rather not take action because of the potential of failure than actually take action and have the chance of failure. We need to publish all of your research on the parklets, because it's just fascinating.
I'll write an article on it and I would love to call on one city, just do this, be the leader of all the other cities to look to, to say, "Hey, our next increment of our parklet program is that we're going to redesign one block and allow restaurants to use it as open cafe space and see what happens."
There's some simple things cities could do. I don't know why a city thinks that a restaurant owner is going to understand what the roadway level of service is. They're going to have to hire an engineer who's going to be skeptical of this. If I really wanted to support my local businesses—many of these restaurants are all locally owned, not national chains. They've kind of figured this out, but the people that will benefit most are our local businesses. I would simply go with my city engineer and my map of the city and identify all the streets like green—these are the streets I have no question in my mind are low speed, we have too much asphalt, or we have the ability to just eyeball it and put an outdoor dining. I'd just green all of those streets, and it's just like a buy right? You're a restaurant owner. I'm the city engineer, public works director. I can come out, eyeball it with some chalk and tell you where to put it and be done.
Then I go to the next level of streets. These are the ones that are maybe a little bit more dicey, or like an area that we need to do a little more analysis on. I would just identify that I'm going to not wait for the private sector to figure it out. That's important for our city. I'm going to start figuring out what I need to do from a city-wide standpoint to make that yellow street move to green.
Then I'm going to identify ones that are just like, "No way. These are ones that there's narrows, that parking is a priority, or capacity is a priority," and we just lay those out. We could cut through a lot of the mystery and a lot of that beta testing just by sharing what our technical staff already know. The street that has all the hydrants, we just say, "Okay, that's a street that's going to need additional technical review." This street doesn't have hydrants, so they're at a location we don't have to worry about, and we could go out and yield a lot of these without a lot of paperwork and months of debate.
Just in the spring, we'll go out. It'll be a fun way for our city engineer or public works director to get out of the office and meet with business owners and kind of point and figure out where they go. Yeah, and roll with it.
I think that is the difference between local government operating as a more top-down entity versus more bottom-up. In a lot of these programs, from the perspective of a local business owner, you're like, "Okay, there's this program. It's very technical. There's all these rules. I need to fill out an application. I have to hire someone to do a site plan and data." The more of that you put in front of somebody, especially if you're a small local business owner with no background in this, maybe English is not even your first language—that's just not going to get people to participate in a program like that.
Versus if you're a local government and you proactively come out and make a decision about what the space is going to be based on the fact that there is a market for it, and there are restaurants that we already know where they're wanting to do this. Then just build for what people want to do and make it as straightforward as possible to participate, with very simple, straightforward rules for business owners to follow and then manage it. Obviously, people would say this is all more easily said than done, but I would just invite people to really think about how these programs work from the point of view of a small business owner who has no background in planning or public works, no technical expertise in these areas, and who maybe doesn't even speak English.
Yeah, have them walk in the shoes of these business owners. Abby, I love your idea of creating the very first food-hall street.
Yes, I love that.
If you're a city out there and you're thinking, "How can we be innovative? How can we be bottom-up?" Abby's the person to talk to, because she has ideas of how to get you to develop a food-truck street or a food-hall street that would allow for lots of innovation, lots of excitement on a street. This would be even more exciting than a farmer's market.
I think it would. Every city wants a farmer's market. Let's do a food-hall street. I'll just say, the first city that builds one of these, Strong Towns will hype you up. We'll write an article. We will hype you up. That would just be so cool. These parklet programs, these pilot programs in cities, are kind of like a signal for where to do this. We've done a pilot program, we see where people are participating in these programs. It is your signal for where you might take it to the next level. That's absolutely right. That's the next increment. I want to see somebody build a food-hall street.
It doesn't cost the thousands of dollars or the months of review that each individual business goes through. Abby, you've collected everything to regulate and think about through this stuff. DC has figured out how to make it the most complicated application process, highest price. We could really simplify this and rotate it out and use models we already know that are really bottom-up.
Having a food-hall street—I'm thinking about all of the little pop-up articles that we've shared from across the country of fun activities that could occur. You could have almost breakfast, lunch, and dinner things happening. You could have variety of foods. It would just be the coolest activated space in a city, and it's not reliant on any one building. It truly maximizes the public realm, the space that we all can enjoy.
Edward, I'm going to get this. Hold on one second. People who are listening won't see this, but I'm thinking of a very specific place in a town. I don't remember what town it was. It was in Catalonia in Spain, and I painted it. It's a food-hall street. Do you see this?
This is incredible. For those who don't know, beyond Abby's incredible podcasting skills and her talent as a planner, she's also a very, very talented artist.
Thank you, Edward. You see, this is literally a street that they turned into a plaza. They took all the cars off of it, and people just, there's trees and there's tables, and there's tons of restaurants all along it. People come out. You can order food at the restaurant and go sit down. Servers will come out and check on you and take food orders, and it's probably the next increment to what we're talking about, where you have no cars at all.
But it truly is an amazing, beautiful space, which is why I painted it. It was one of the coolest spaces I've experienced. Here in the United States, these parklet programs, they probably shouldn't be the final stage that we're picturing where we're asking business owners to figure out ADA compliance and fire safety and traffic sight lines.
Because we're asking them to solve the things that a city has yet to solve.
With the city hat on, we've identified all these things—fire safety, sight lines, perimeter barriers, material composition. We've figured out all these things that matter. Then we're telling the business owners to take that and build something out of what we've decided is important when it's the public realm. With the city hat on, it's our street. Let's design it for all these things that we think matter, and not put it on the businesses to design all this stuff and try to figure out an interpretation of all these rules.
Yeah, the people at City Hall are actually the ones that know all this stuff the best. So I always got in trouble, Abby, because I would draw stuff. When I do development review, I could draw stuff faster than I could write up a staff report. Everybody got what I drew. It was no problem, because I just moved stuff on a page and a staff report got hung up on words. The city attorney would come in and talk about interpretation.
As municipal staff, I would really encourage folks to go and take the time and figure it out. You don't have to do the whole city. Pick the area. All the planners I talk to go to incredible conferences—APA, Main Street. They come to our national gathering, they go to CNU, they experience all these places, and they know where the easiest lift is in their community. We can do a lot of stuff in planning so that we can stage it up, so that this is like the next easy step.
We don't have to wait for a hodgepodge of whatever engineer, whatever restaurant comes forward. As we're reviewing plans when they come forward, we can challenge it and make sure that it would accommodate the outdoor dining. So at some point we may have on-street parking. What if we do flush curbing in those areas? What if we do raised planters where we can? As we're developing the street, we get all the pieces lined up so that that next increment is just a matter of fact. It's so evident, we just can do it.
Well, Edward, let's leave it there. I love that we talked about this topic, and it went a direction that I didn't expect, that I think was way better. I'm really excited about this idea, and I can't wait to see the first city to implement a food-hall street where there used to be streeteries or parklets.
We've got to share out your beautiful drawing that inspired all this.
I'll go find it, and I'll send it to you in our Slack chat.
Cool.
Well, let's go to the down zone. This is the part of the show where we can share anything we have been up to these days, anything we've been reading, watching, doing that has been inspiring us. So Edward, I'll throw it to you.
I'm super excited we're coming right up. If you're listening to this right now, we're a week before Thanksgiving. But this weekend, I am driving my whole family up to Notre Dame. I get to take my boys there to where I did my graduate work. There is a Leon Krier conference and exhibit. This is a celebration of his life. I'm really excited, not only of showing my family Notre Dame and doing that whole pilgrimage up there, but also spending some time with others that were also inspired by Leon Krier. He had a huge impact on the trajectory of my professional thinking.
All the people speaking at the symposium were all faculty members, people that introduced me to all of these crazy ideas and helped me figure through that. So I get to geek out a little bit. We get to do a little Fighting Irish. I get to show my kids an incredible college campus, which is way nicer than when I went. Thanks to everybody that's participated in that contribution to the campus. But also spending some time with some really talented architects and thinkers and celebrating the life and work of a really inspirational figure. The beginning part of that's going to be a nine-hour road trip, so pray for us. I'm not sure my boys fully understand what that means, but it's a big throwback for me to all the family trips that I did.
Wow, that sounds like so much fun. It's incredible, the work that Leon Krier has inspired across this profession. I'm a little bit jealous. That sounds amazing, and a good use of the long break as well. I'm actually gearing up for Thanksgiving too. I'm going to be going to St. Louis, and I've been really getting into buying cooking magazines because of Thanksgiving. But now I'm generally buying magazines when I go to the grocery store. When I was looking into Thanksgiving recipes and trying to think of something creative to do, you go to your phone and you type in recipes, and you go to these websites, and they're all associated with a long, drawn-out blog about the recipe, and it takes forever to actually find the recipe. So that was driving me crazy. Now I've started going to grocery stores and just buying food magazines that have all of the recipes on the page so that I don't have to look at a screen every time I'm trying to make something. So that's something I've been getting into recently, and will probably continue to do. Going a little bit old school and actually buying magazines again.
I'll show you one of the guilty pleasures my wife and I have. We go to thrift stores and used bookstores and look for church cookbooks.
Oh, interesting.
The old church ladies had collected all the family recipes, and they're usually in a spiral bound. The ones that are great, but the prize for us to find are the ones where they have notes on the pages about the family or the recipe or how to make it better. The handling. Every once in a while we'll go across and we'll find the Episcopalians or the Lutherans. There'll be their little cookbooks, and then you'll find the page with the special cookie or Susie's potato casserole. It'll have notes on that stuff. So if you're out and about and that's your jam, look at all the used bookstores and thrift stores for the church cookbooks and flip through. Do you find notes? Because some of them are gossipy.
That's fun. Yeah.
They'll talk about whatever Christmas when they were first introduced to this or that.
Yeah, I'll get very invested in the drama of these cookbooks.
It's so refreshing just to have the core information you want, that you don't have to go through a six-page blog to figure out. You don't have the ingredients.
Yes, yes. There's something about having to pick up your phone, go to the tab that you are at, and then it refreshes, and then you have to scroll back down. There's something about just having it on paper that works really well. I think you've just inspired what I'm going to be doing maybe for the rest of the day, because I'm off this afternoon. I think I'm going to go to Half Price Books and go to their used cookbook section and try to find something like that. I'll let you know if I find anything.
Yeah, if they're good, once you test out the recipes and they're good ones, be sure to share.
Yeah, I will absolutely. Cool. Well, hey, thank you very much for bringing this article to our attention and for spending some time on Upzoned this week. Appreciate it.
Great, thanks. It's always a pleasure to hang out with you and share ideas.
I love it. Awesome. Thanks everyone for listening to another episode of Upzoned. Bye.
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