My Privileged Youth: After My Summer of Florence

by John Massengale Posted on December 1, 2020

MY JOB AT THE RED GUTTER ended in late August. I rented a FIAT Cinquecento and spent a week driving through Tuscany and Umbria, hitting all the highlights like Todi and Perugia.

I had a little over a week until I met up with my parents in Venice. I had a good time visiting Italian hill towns I had never seen, but before a week had gone by, my money was running out. This was September 1969, and I didn’t have a credit card. I don’t remember how I rented a car without a credit card, but I did.

I drove to Venice, which took most of the day. I spent all the money I had putting more gas in the tank. Luckily, that bought enough gas to reach the Piazzale Italia (where I was to return the car, next to the train station). At one point, I didn’t think it would be enough.

Continue reading →

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A Halloween Story

by John Massengale Posted on October 31, 2020

Almost forty years ago, I successfully “flipped” a tiny old house in north Greenwich. The house was a little under two miles from the Westchester Airport, which is on the Greenwich border.

This was before 9/11, and you could arrive at the airport and be on the plane in less than 10 minutes if you ran. One morning I was scheduled to fly to Florida to speak at the University of Miami. Before leaving for the airport I had a call from the organizer of the event, and we got into a conversation about content. Suddenly he said, “What time is your flight? Don’t you need to go?” Continue reading →

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Tales From My Privileged Youth / Palate Cleanser

by John Massengale Posted on July 20, 2020

(NB: If you start to lose interest, jump down to the surprise ending.)

I GREW UP in Darien, Connecticut, where my father had a college friend named John Pierpont (“Mr. Pierpont” to me). Mr. Pierpont was a tall, elegant man. I’m not sure what his work was. Maybe he was on Madison Avenue. I assume people still know that means someone who worked in advertising.

At some point, well before he was 65, he either retired or was fired (I think it was the latter). He soon became the movie critic for the Darien Review. In Darien nearly everyone read the Review, but the town population at the time was under 15,000 people, so working as their movie critic was not a highly sought-after or well-paid job.

One day, Mr. Pierpont was working at home when there was a knock on the door. The Pierponts’ house was in a part of town with no sidewalks, and Mr. Pierpont wasn’t expecting anyone, so that was surprising. Continue reading →

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We Built This City To Walk And Stroll

by John Massengale Posted on July 17, 2020

“What if we treated historic districts historically, making the cars accommodate the city, rather than the other way around?”

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Tales From My Privileged Youth

by John Massengale Posted on June 18, 2020

I WAS LUCKY. I was sitting around with friends during the spring term of my senior year in college. “I want to go to Europe,” I said. “How can I get a job there?”

“Call Franco at the Red Garter in Florence,” a friend called out. “He’ll give you a job.” And he was right. Continue reading →

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Crain’s New York: Change the Streets & Change the City

by John Massengale Posted on June 8, 2020


My op-ed in Crain’s New York is in the magazine this week and has been online for more than a week. The online version is longer than the print version but is behind a paywall. You can buy access to both the magazine and the online articles for 8 weeks for $7. The print version of the op-ed is in a PDF (scroll down), and the full text is here:

The protest marches on our city streets demand our attention. But with Phase 1 of the Coronavirus Reopening starting today, we still need to think about how to use those public spaces to survive the fallout from the most widespread health crisis of our time. If we don’t pay attention now, it may be too late.

Even before the reopening, there were twice as many people driving into Manhattan as we saw at the lowest point in April. But when asked how we can prevent cars from coming back in higher numbers than ever in the next few weeks, Mayor de Blasio said New Yorkers will have to “improvise” how they get to work.

“I really want to push back on the notion that we can solve everything all the time,” de Blasio said.

That’s not good enough. Here’s a three-part plan for Open Streets that can help reopen and renew New York City.

Continue reading →

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My Recent Op-Eds

by John Massengale Posted on June 8, 2020

New York Times
New York Daily News (print)
Crain’s New York Business (print)
Streetsblog NYC
City Limits

Many others in local papers and publications like the Berkshire Record and The Patent Trader. For a complete list, click here.

Bonus: Two Wall Street Journal Book Reviews (print)

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“I feel like it’s 1968,” says every reporter on CNN and MSNBC watching the protest marches.

by John Massengale Posted on June 7, 2020

In another, less grave context, I wrote about one of my favorite Harvard professors, who back in the 1980s talked about what he thought were connections between the 1960s and the 21st century (see below). Today, like the reporters on CNN and MSNBC, I watch the demonstrations and sometimes feel like we’re back in 1968, when black Americans rioted in cities across the country.

There were other riots and marches that year too. Students famously rioted in Paris, almost bringing down the French government. Czechs marched for “socialism with a human face” during the Prague Spring, until Russian troops rolled into the city with tanks and crushed the demonstrators. American students protesting Vietnam fought Chicago police outside the Democratic convention. One year later, the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village were the beginning of Gay Pride and Gay Liberation in America.

Continue reading →

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#OpenBrooklynBridge

by John Massengale Posted on May 29, 2020

#OpenStreets + #CarFreeBroolynBridge = #OpenBrooklynBridge

Simple back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that within one year motor vehicle traffic would decrease by 100%, bicycle traffic would increase more than 1100%, and there would be twice as many pedestrians as on the High Line.

Download the Car Free Brooklyn Bridge PDF

After Move NY Comes Slow NY

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My Streetsblog Op-Ed: If Not Now, When? Changing the Car Culture

by John Massengale Posted on May 5, 2020

“We worked for years to reduce car use. If everybody drives a car, there is no space for people, there is no space to move, there is no space for commercial activities outside the shops.” ~ Milan deputy mayor Marco Granelli

In normal times, we have too many cars moving around New York City. Why? Because we spend billions of dollars on roads and highways that encourage people to drive. Milan, Brussels, and Paris are all using Open Street experiments during the pandemic to permanently change the driving culture in their cities. Let’s not waste this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, New York.

Read the rest of the op-ed at Streetsblog.

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Quiet Streets – Making Lemonade from Lemons

by John Massengale Posted on March 30, 2020
Yorkville Promenade (Second Avenue), New York, New York, Massengale & Co LLC and Dover, Kohl & Partners, 2011. An aerial view looking south from 86th Street.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson called for making New York City streets safer for pedestrians and social distancing while we all stay close to home. Mayor de Blasio responded with a program to open more space for pedestrians on one street per borough.

We can do more. We should use this time when traffic is light to work on ideas for safer, quieter, and more pleasant streets for pedestrians and cyclists now and in the future. During this COVID-19 crisis, we can implement ideas that are great for the long-term health of the city. Specifically, let’s make some of our quiet side-streets primarily for cyclists and walkers.

Quiet Streets (continue reading at Streetsblog)

More Photos at Slow New York
Download a PDF

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A Chicane Is Not A Shared Space Place

by John Massengale Posted on October 22, 2019
Looking north on University Place towards the 14th Street Busway. Manhattan’s newest slow street.

A space is only a place if people want to be there. The chicane shown above is for traffic calming, not placemaking. Putting that another way, it’s a product of traffic engineering, not a piece of urban design.

I understand this design is a step towards something better, which is slower, safer streets in New York City. I support that, but there’s no reason it can’t be a better place for people than it is. This is supposed to be a shared-space street, and there are better ways to get to that goal.

We know from social science and neuroscience studies that both our conscious and unconscious thoughts gravitate to beauty and seek to avoid ugliness. Our conscious minds might think the “flexible delineator posts” make sense and don’t look too bad, but our unconscious self is repelled. It sees the cheap plastic sticks and other cues that mark the space as a place for machines, and it knows that’s a dangerous place for humans.

The easiest way to make a place for people on a straight street is to line everything up: the buildings, the sidewalks, the trees, the roadway, and even the paint (if there is paint—see below). Continue reading →

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Streets for People, or Streets for Profit?

by John Massengale Posted on June 5, 2019

My Op-Ed at City Limits (click to read)

Excerpt:

AVs will be programmed to stop immediately if a pedestrian steps in front of them to cross the street—and we all know that given the opportunity, New Yorkers will do that all day. That would make Manhattan traffic move even more slowly than it does now.

Companies that have invested billions of dollars in self-driving cars will do their best to stop that. There is already talk of facial-recognition software to identify the pedestrian troublemakers interrupting traffic. Pedestrians and motor vehicles will be even more strictly segregated than they are now. This goes against one of the most popular trends in street use today, which is a movement towards what is known as “shared space.”

Alternative titles:

Google, Uber, and the Road Ahead
Big Tech + Big Finance = Organized Motordom 2.0
Coming Soon To A Street Near You

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Architecture Is Frozen Music

by John Massengale Posted on June 1, 2019

Imagine the following scenario. There are some problems with it, but you’ll get the point.

The Berlin Philharmonic has the only sheet music for Mozart’s Requiem. One day, a fire destroys the last 10 pages.

Angela Merkel announces that the National Treasure will be restored within 3 years, before the World Music Festival in Berlin in 2023.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung proposes that Philip Glass rewrite the ending in a minimalist style appropriate for our time.

(continue reading at the CNU Public Square)

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