Kottke links to two “New York” items that are actually Toronto items.
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Exit Strategy, “an iPhone app that tells you where to get on the subway train so as to be in an optimal position when you get off,” is merely a digitized version of Sean Lerner’s lovingly manufactured TTC Subway Rider Efficiency Guide. Obviously we need a digital version; equally obviously, Exit Strategy isn’t a New York idea. (Who was the very first anywhere to invent the “prewalking” guide?)
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Naming a street Jane Jacobs Way is all well and good. It is even of interest that “the townhouse that Jacobs lived in on the street is for sale.” Except Jane Jacobs moved here, lived here, and died here. Calling Jacobs a New Yorker even decades after she left seems much worse than insisting that, say, Jim Carrey is still “a Canadian.”
Kottke has a whole category of posts spinning the myth that Jacobs spent her whole life working for the betterment of New York City. In reality, she left.
Could it be, could it just very possibly be, that New York isn’t Number 1 in every single thing?