San Francisco's once-barren industrial waterfront between the Giants ballpark and Candlestick Point is rapidly becoming a 13-mile-long green patchwork of restored wetlands, parks and a maritime museum connected by bicycle paths, walking trails and the nearby Third Street MUNI light rail. It's part of the greening and peopling of Port District waterfronts that includes an accidental bird wonderland where a cargo pier was never completed, the open space around Candlestick Park (which will be demolished this year and replaced with 6,000 homes) and lots of little pieces along the shore being put together by the Port of San Francisco and the city's parks department.

Early this year, John Patrick Leary, a professor of American literature at Wayne State University, published a story in Guernica called "Detroitism" about, primarily, the two competing journalistic and artistic narratives about the Motor City.

There’s the Detroit Lament, which he describes as an examination of the city’s decline that is mostly told through the examination of physical spaces. You may have heard it referred to as "ruin porn." And there’s the Detroit Utopia, stories which purport to show a new way forward for the city, be it through urban farming, $100 homes or bicycling. (Utopian depictions of Detroit, Leary noted, tend to involve young creative white people.)

Leary [...]

From this morning's press release on BRUNCH:

Authored by Council Member Dan Garodnick, the bill will allow sidewalk cafes to open at 10 a.m.—two hours earlier—on Sundays. Restaurants today are prohibited from opening their sidewalk cafes before noon on Sundays, despite being able to open in the morning every other day of the week. "New Yorkers will not be denied their Sunday brunch in the beautiful weather,” said Council Member Dan Garodnick, Chair of the City Council's Committee on Consumer Affairs. “This regulation is outdated, widely disregarded, and hostile to business and brunch-loving New Yorkers. It needs to change."

Ooohhkay. What's next, allowing dancing in bars?

"According to urban planner Richard Layman, a long-time chronicler of new restaurants’ relation to shifting neighborhood demographics, Thai eateries are generally among the 'second wave' of retailers to set up shop in an up-and-coming part of town. Mexican, or Tex-Mex, usually comes first, in Layman’s view. But Thai is an increasingly prevalent indicator of change, he says." —Understanding gentrification by new restaurants. (We presume the Mexicans take over the leases when the Chinese plexiglass-window places close up; see also Williamsburg, 1996.)

The Fordham Institute analyzed the fastest-whitening neighborhoods in America between 2000 and 2010, according to census data. Brooklyn had four of the most-whitened zip codes of the top 25 most-whitened zip codes in all of America. We win!

And when you map it out, those four zip codes actually make up just two areas that are contiguous. I've combined them here on Google Maps.

• First: 11238 and 11205. That's Prospect Heights, essentially, to the south, and then where Fort Greene and Clinton Hill meet. Lemme tell you, I was right living right there in the middle, on the Clinton Hill/Fort Greene border, last week, and glorious Clinton Avenue [...]

You know when you’re in a panel discussion in New York and the topic turns to gentrification, and the audience gets very quiet while everyone prays there won’t be some guy who stands up and says something excruciating? L. J. Davis was that guy.

Davis, a writer whose career was long enough that a lot of people forgot who he was for stretches along the way, died last week at 70. He wrote four novels in the '60s and '70s and, over a longer span, produced a substantial body of cranky and annoyingly accurate journalism. (A Harper’s article that essentially called the 1987 market crash won him a [...]