Word: forte
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...kind of place where, when I left to go check out Burlington, Wolf and Saunders, 50 and 59, dropped some scones into a care package for my trip. Burlington has tougher challenges than Fort Madison. The much bigger, grittier downtown was built for the industrial railroad hub that Burlington once was, and big, boxy buildings sit vacant now. But just as in Fort Madison, there is something worth saving here, where neighborhoods sweep up gracefully from the banks of the Mississippi to form an amphitheater with terrific views of downtown and the bridge that spokes majestically across the river...
...unabashedly partial to a town where gin and tonics are available on the street, and even more partial when I'm invited to the party. I can't say what downtown Fort Madison or Burlington will look like in 10 years, or in 25, but I drank to their future, and to the future of every community that stands up to the steamroller. There is some evidence that as the work force becomes more flexible, more of the people who can work from home are choosing downtowns. Ground-floor and second-floor occupancy rates were up in Main Street towns...
...Fort Madison, while rehabbing a storefront, a workman peeled back an atrocious-looking aluminum facade and found carved wooden columns and stained-glass windows beneath. Several townsfolk heard the news and strolled over to celebrate the discovery of the buried treasure. Later in the day, there was a buzz at the Ivy Bake Shoppe, and upstairs, in Martha Wolf's sprawling Early American loft, the view of the Mississippi, which widens to nearly a mile beneath the old swing-span bridge, was stunning...
...glass Parthenon, like Mies van der Rohe's National Gallery in Berlin, or an elaborately "timeless" spatial event, like Louis Kahn's Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. It is not an operatic signature building, like Frank Gehry's titanium-sheathed meganautilus in Bilbao, Spain. Still less is it a feat of conspicuously externalized luxury, like Richard Meier's Getty Center, poised in marble aloofness above Los Angeles...
...FORT MADISON, IOWA Residents find inventive ways of reviving Main Street...