An interior courtyard at Sunnyside Garden Apartments. Photo Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg.

The population of children under five is shrinking across the US. That group has decreased most rapidly in big cities: 14% in Los Angeles County, 18% percent in New York City and 15% percent in Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago.

This is bad news for the diversity and stability of cities, which are improved by the amenities that families seek — parks, public libraries, safe streets. It’s also discouraging for families who prefer to live in the city or don’t have the option or desire to move to the car-dominated suburbs. Any effort to retain families has to start with housing, their primary expense.

That one weird trick for making cities more family-friendly? We’ve known it for decades: It’s the courtyard.

In 1970s Cambridge, grain salads and hummus abounded. I carried my lunch in a gray plastic Thermos lunchpail big enough to corral my daily array of tiny orange Tupperwares. Even today, a sandwich is my lunch of last resort.

So strong is my identification with Tupperware that I even made it into a verb: To Tupp, i.e. “Let me Tupp the leftovers.” (And yes, I do know this is slang for something else in Britain.)

While a few of those one-serving Tupperware cups are still floating around my family’s cupboards, I may not be able to Tupp much longer: Tupperware Brands filed for bankruptcy protection in September, “succumbing to mounting losses due to poor demand for its once popular colorful food storage containers,” according to Reuters.

The chic durability of 100% linen.

My late grandmother’s house comes with forever things. A dark-stained oval dining table, a Cosanti bell, nesting phoebes, and a drawer full of tea towels. On some, the original design is faded into oblivion, leaving faint organic lines across the woven fabric. Others proudly display the calendar for 1995 under the bright silhouette of a chicken, the alphabet in flowers (H is for Hyacinth, I is for Iris), a William Morris print.

In the drawer they seem depleted. Hung on the hook by the sink, or draped over the oven door handle to dry, they are limp. These are not the dish towels of kitchen renovation dreams, casually draped over a farmhouse sink, or the kitchen towels of influencer Instagram, folded in fat packages into an under-sink caddy.

And yet, as I wiped dinner dishes or spread out blueberries to dry, they proved there was still life in these natural fibers. Every towel worked better than the new ones I had at home, purchased on the recommendation of one of the perpetual recommendation engines. The contemporary towels were thick, were looped, were two-sided, and were made of natural fibers. But as I approached them with dripping hands, their smooth surfaces seemed to shy away from the work. Those Williams-Sonoma waffle towels? The Wirecutter pick? They refused to absorb.

Hugh Hayden’s “Brier Patch” (2022). Yasunori Matsui / Madison Square Park Conservancy.

The first time Hugh Hayden tried to build a playground, his client said no. The sculptor’s pitch to the nonprofit Public Art Fund included a full-size play structure made of wood and covered in thorns. The curators got the point of the piece, titled “America.” The problem was that the prickly playground would have to be fenced off.

The piece Hayden ultimately made had an equally thorny backstory, but a smoother shell. “Gulf Stream” is a beautifully crafted oak rowboat that, upon approach, reveals itself to have the frame of an enormous ribcage — as if Jonah’s boat and Jonah’s whale had merged into one uncanny object. Hayden drew on references from art history, namely Winslow Homer’s painting of a Black man alone in a boat in shark-infested waters and Kerry James Marshall’s depiction of a more idyllic version of the same. Kids got it right away.

“We had no idea how popular it would be as a playground,” Hayden says. “Literally within 30 seconds that we installed it, children ran up and parents started taking their photos with children climbing on it.”

Lesson learned: Put a climbable structure in a park and it’s gonna get climbed.

Skateboarding at Paris 2024. Photo by Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images.

A punk pastime made massively popular by the Olympics has reached amenity status with ‘skate gardens.’

Skateboarding has rarely been welcomed anywhere. But the boards’ urethane wheels, adopted from roller skates, meant it could be practiced everywhere—on stairs, rails, benches, ramps, culverts and, in the drought-plagued summers of the mid-1970s, empty swimming pools.

Skate parks can be found in the corners of cities: beneath viaducts and overpasses, besides vent stacks and port terminals and in parks on the edge of town. These spaces may evoke skating’s guerilla origins, but they fail to represent skating today: an Olympic phenomenon, a $3.2 billion business and a sport that spans Generations X to Alpha.

While skateboarding has been embraced by the establishment that skaters once had to outrun—elite skaters are competing for gold at the Place de la Concorde in the Paris Olympics—the sport’s everyday facilities typically remain on the fringes of the urban landscape.

The Moore/Andersson Compound in Austin, Texas (1984–87). Photo courtesy Kevin Keim.

To safeguard Charles Moore and Arthur Andersson’s Austin compound against extreme weather, a caretaker looks to the best of its design.

During the February 2021 Texas deep freeze known as Snovid, the Moore/Andersson Compound in Austin was fine—if having a decimated garden and needing to blast the pipes with a hairdryer in the middle of the night can be considered fine. “I went and rescued several friends whose power went out, who were freezing in their homes,” says Kevin Keim, the hands-on director of the Charles Moore Foundation, a nonprofit that owns and takes care of several buildings by Moore, the architect, who died in 1993.

Two winters later, the compound, which Moore designed in 1987 with business partner Arthur Andersson, and which is widely considered to be a postmodern masterpiece, wasn’t so lucky. “During one of the freezes, the pool pump froze and burst, and all the basin water drained into the Gulf of Mexico,” Keim recalls.

Gazing at the empty rectangle, he saw an opportunity.

The scene at The Rabbit hOle in Kansas City, Missouri.

In the great green room (just off the bookshop) there was a telephone (oversized) and a red balloon (hung from the ceiling) and a picture of a cow jumping over the moon (above the fireplace). Lift the telephone’s handset — a novelty unto itself for the under-10-year-olds — and the son of Goodnight Moon illustrator Clement Hurd reads that book’s alluring, rhythmic first pages, calling out each element in the room (phone, balloon, cow).

Transfixing, for the child not otherwise distracted by three-dimensional versions of other objects pictured in the book, like the toyhouse (big enough to crawl inside), the mittens on the drying rack (detachable) or the glowing electric flames (cosy).

This scene would be enough to capture the attention of most children. But as visitors to “The Rabbit hOle,” a new 45,000-square-foot (and growing) immersive experience in Kansas City, Missouri, will soon find, there is always another twist to this story. Tug on the fake fire and it moves as one piece, bringing the andirons, logs and fireback with it. Through an arched opening, one can see white floors and painters’ tape.

“In the next phase, this will lead to the Tons of Fun room,” says Emily Hane, development and grants manager for this sprawling North Kansas City museum devoted to children’s books.

In the world down the rabbit hole, first dreamed up by artists, co-founders and former booksellers Pete Cowdin and Deb Pettid in 2015, Goodnight Moon leads to John Steptoe’s urban stroll Uptown, which leads to Tomie de Paola’s Italian village tale Strega Nona, and on and on, winding through building environments from one beloved story book after another. As they make their way through the museum’s levels, carved from a former warehouse by architects Multistudio, kids groove in Harlem or read a book under a chapeau-bedecked tree, bake a pie with Sal’s mother or check to see whether Klassen’s bear really did eat that rabbit.

“Not everyone knows what they want or need until they see it,” says Cowdin. “We build this and it is like, plop, in the middle of this phone-driven world it is a total place of relief for people.”