Longform
Deep dives on cities, architecture, design, real estate, and urban planning.
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Learning to love the ‘Persian Palaces’ of Beverly Hills
"Persian Palaces"—boxy mansions with huge columns out front—have a bad reputation in LA, but the style has deep roots in Iranian culture, going back thousands of years, and they provide some consistency for Persians who fled their country after the 1979 revolution.
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On Staten Island, a centuries-old waterway helps shape new wetlands
It’s not often that you can watch a river being remade amid the dense fabric of New York City, and a walk along Staten Island's New Creek is rare opportunity to view both the past and future of the city’s waterfront.
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From house of worship to house of sin: The history of Chelsea’s Limelight building
The Church of the Holy Communion has had many lives
Inside Baltimore’s ambitious effort to eliminate blight
Vacants to Value has spent six years trying to sell Baltimore’s vacant properties to owners who will rehab them. Is the effort working?
Inside Hawaii’s modernist masterpieces
Russian-born architect Val Ossipoff arrived in Hawaii in 1931 and spent decades developing his vision of tropical modernism, with buildings that sprang seamlessly from the local landscape. Here, take a look around some of his most stunning work.
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The ranch that Big Macs built
When Ray Kroc struck it rich with McDonald's, one of his first purchases was the J & R Double Arch Ranch on California's Central Coast. There, he hosted parties, food experiments, and—strangely enough—health conferences.
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In the Bronx, finding nature along a hidden, polluted waterway
Even the most bastardized waterways in New York City have beauty hidden along their lengths, and Westchester Creek is no exception. Once described as "the Bronx’s version of the Gowanus Canal," it's now experiencing a resurgence of nature.
Can your city change your mind?
The design of our spaces can heal us, hurt us, and alter the way we think
Airbnb vs. the city
How short-term rentals are changing urban neighborhoods
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The thirstiest town in the West
Borrego Springs—a tiny community in the middle of the Anza-Borrego Desert—was once a natural oasis poised to become California’s next great resort destination. But today the water is running out and the town has become parched and bitter.
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Los Angeles is killing us
LA's two most legendary cemeteries are Forest Lawn Memorial Park, developed by a charismatic man nicknamed The Builder, and Hollywood Forever, run for decades by an ex-con who led it into ruin. Can they help us find the secrets of mortality?
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Four years after Sandy, Staten Island's shoreline is transformed
Staten Island is in the midst of implementing "strategic retreat" as a way of returning its damaged post-Sandy areas to nature. Here's what its storm recovery efforts can teach NYC about climate change.
10 streets that define America
We take an exhaustive look at the forces shaping our cities today: the regenerative power of small businesses, changes brought by new development, alternative transportation options, and rich, if burdensome, cultural legacies.
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Ghosts of early California
The reign of the Spanish-run California missions was brief and often brutal, giving rise to a variety of supernatural legends. Join us as we take a tour of the missions and meet some of the spooky spirits that supposedly reside therein.
Why Fixer Upper is a stealth feminist fantasy
The number one cable show in its timeslot among viewers ages 25 to 54, the real explanation for the show’s success is Joanna Gaines, one-half of Fixer Upper’s power couple.
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Infinite upon infinite: New York City in maps
A new atlas by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro highlights the city as ‘a place that contains worlds’
Can Portland survive its popularity?
Portland, Oregon is in the midst of a population boom, but the notoriously well-planned city is having trouble adjusting to the influx. Preservationists are hoping a first-of-its-kind ordinance can save some of what makes Portland so special.
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How to get into Gramercy Park
I spent an afternoon in New York City’s most exclusive park.
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The abandoned graveyards of early LA
LA’s first cemeteries were the "eternal" resting places for everyone from Mission Indians to the governor of Mexican California to Wild West outlaws. As the young city grew, though, they were defiled, dug up, and bulldozed in the name of progress.
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A small Queens community confronts climate change along Hawtree Creek
Hawtree Creek passes through a pocket of New York City that feels like it belongs to a different century. Now, it's on the front lines of climate change, as rising tides create new problems for longtime residents.
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When public housing goes private
Can Chicago’s architects and developers work with public housing residents to change a broken system?
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Santa Ana winds: What causes them and how they affect us
The Santa Ana winds and their supposedly sinister effects loom large in the Los Angeles imagination. But how much do the winds really change us? And how much are we changing them?
Midcentury modern design goes back to nature
The obsession with midcentury modern has recently evolved to include lush, jungly greenery and sculptural gardens. These verdant spaces may help scrub the air, but they also serve as uneasy reminders of our environmental anxieties.
When tiny homes hit the road
Decades before shows like Tiny House Hunters spawned a nationwide obsession, an earlier generation of do-it-yourself builders launched a mini-house boom of their own, converting flatbeds, bread trucks, and school buses into tiny homes on wheels.
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Meet New York's go-to architect for redesigning small spaces
Michael Chen didn’t set out to found an architecture firm known for redesigning tiny New York City apartments, but it’s quickly become the thing his firm, MKCA, is best known for. Learn how he approaches the challenge of redesigning small spaces.
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Is there a future for micro housing in New York City?
A belief that spacious apartments translate to a better quality of life has prevailed in New York, but the city's latest population boom has turned that belief on its head. But does that mean more micro apartments are coming? Curbed investigates.
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Inside the fight to save Gabler's Creek, a hidden Queens waterway
The fact that Gabler’s Creek even exists today is largely due to the work of the Udalls Cove Preservation Committee (UCPC), a small neighborhood organization founded in 1969 by the concerned residents of Douglaston and Little Neck.
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Park Moderne: LA’s lost Oz
The first subdivision in the now-tony town of Calabasas was Park Moderne, an avant-garde colony in a rustic setting that attracted artists from Jan de Swart to John Steinbeck to Jimmy Durante. Today, the retreat has been almost entirely wiped out.
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Welcome to Freshkills, local landfill-turned-park
The manmade hills of Staten Island's Freshkills Park are inarguably beautiful, but they're also indicative of the disposability of the post-war American way of life. Karrie Jacobs explains, while taking us through the new, 2,200-acre park.
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Time traveling on the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway
The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway is an incredible feat of engineering that brings riders from the desert floor to a wintry mountaintop. It could only make sense in Palm Springs, where the natural and unnatural collide in unexpected ways.
When an Airbnb gives you a new identity
A temporary rental that calls to mind a 1970s house party reminds one writer that houses have a way of shaping what kinds of lives feel possible.
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The last days of Admiral's Row's stately, neglected mansions
"It is an ugly thing to live in a timeless place"
Meet the man who dedicated his life to creating artificial rivers
In East Texas, Jeff Henry has created a network of infinite artificial rivers at his family’s chain of water parks, Schlitterbahn. Think of it as nature well-suited for a generation raised on electronically enabled instant gratification
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Malibu's spectacular first beach house
In the days when their family owned all of Malibu, an heiress and a wannabe cowboy built themselves a seaside mansion covered in spectacular tilework. Malibu was eventually sold off piece by piece, but the Adamson House still stands.
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Venice Beach wants to leave Los Angeles
The seaside neighborhood, once known for its weirdness and diversity, has gentrified into a wealthy tech enclave. As old and new residents fight for their visions of Venice, could secession from LA be next?
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A decade on, Brooklyn’s Pacific Park megaproject is finally realized
Simply put, the megaproject formerly known as Atlantic Yards is truly, finally, becoming a thing. Curbed checks in on the site's progress as it prepares to welcome its first residents.
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The surprising history of an abandoned Adirondack summer camp
A writer reporting on the architecture of New York’s Eagle Island makes some unexpected discoveries.
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Development threatens the future of a Far Rockaway waterway
A visit to Bridge Creek, where manmade landscape meets natural world
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Before the World Trade Center
The rise and fall of New York City’s Little Syria and Radio Row.