A bold new proposal of trivial merit.

3blocks — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:30:32 +0000

Of late I have been half-enthusiastically/half-sheepishly starting to call my stretch of Packard “the Interurban Trail” as a nod (prompted by a recent visit from E. Vielmetti) to Packard’s history as the route of the former Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti Street Railway (otherwise the Ypsi-Ann). I figure the Interurban Trail has sufficient throw-back cachet to appeal to the ersatz steam-punk urban development crowd and as noted by local polymath-type Larry Kestenbaum, naming is a good way to raise awareness of your neighborhood — in this case a neighborhood I happen to esteem, occasional underdog though it may be.

(All this prompted somewhat by today’s impulse purchase of Darrin Nordahl’s My Kind of Transit, which waxes eloquent on the subject [inter alia] of San Francisco’s latter-day Market Street streetcar system.)

Central Packard is my beat.

3blocks — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:48:03 +0000

Some people call it the Interurban Trail. Every day I head to work down my little chunk of it — past the defunct aquarium retail outlet, two automotive shops done up predominately in maize and blue, a burrito place that runs its own party bus and a dentist’s office — until I end up in a converted beer bottle warehouse between a place that offers music lessons and one that offers wine and cheese, cheese, cheese.

I enjoy my commute.

3 Blocks.

A bold new proposal of trivial merit.

Central Packard is my beat.