News break . . . News Break . . . I am back at my desk after riding out the 5.4 Chino Hills earthquake . . . LCI (Landscape Communications, Inc.) headquarters shook pretty good and all of us were on our feet contemplating the next move, but the earth stopped shaking and the dust has pretty well settled . . .

So back to New York, which is apropos for this streetscapes issue. In this issue you will find several great downtown redevelopments that actually incorporate landscape into the streetscape. I will be scouring the streets of New York looking for any sign of a healthy tree or plantscape in that urban jungle.

Sure, Central Park is an icon for landscape architects, but one park does not a city make. Statues are neat but provide zero oxygen . . .Same with custom light poles and pavers . . .

To be fair, I did visit Battery Park on the last visit and found that to be a great little venue, well designed, almost surreal at the foot of Manhattan. Battery Park has a well-balanced mix of green and hardscape elements.

Still, I walked from Times Square to Battery Park and besides finding a vendor selling live toads (there were about 30 sets of big green eyes looking up from the bin), there was virtually no wildlife and scarcely a vibrant plant to be found between the two.

Living in Southern California, we don?EUR??,,??t really have a downtown . . . More like small stands of tall buildings cropping up across the landscape. As the song suggests, ?EUR??,,??nobody walks in LA?EUR??,,?? . . . However, now that gas prices are through the roof we are seeing more and more people driving smaller cars (there is one from India that looks kind of like a moving phone booth), golf carts, scooters and many are riding their bikes to wherever they need to get.

This is sort of the antithesis of urban sprawl. Give people options and they will find solutions.

I have been in most of the major cities throughout the U.S. and have seen many downtown areas that offer centralized amenities. Boston has a nice area where people live side-by- side with common park-type medians on tree lined streets. But for many, me included, low density is still the preferable living condition.

One of the biggest problems with sprawl is the transportation elements needed to get around. Over the past several years with the SUV as king, it has created a lot of congestion and pollution. But now that all of us are thinking about alternative methods of motorization, we could be on the verge of seeing a renaissance of urban design, allowing for sprawl while parsing down the heat generating corridors of transportation.

We want it all and we want it now . . . and what we want is to be free to move about as we see fit. With golf carts, scooters, bikes and phone booths it may be possible to allow separation of business and residence, allow people to keep their back yards and allow more room for parks and centralized landscape elements as well.

Now I?EUR??,,??m not sure how this next trip to NYC will turn out. This time we are renting an apartment suite in a high rise on 9th Avenue. Maybe the addition of having a doorman and a little separation from Times Square will change my opinion of the Big Apple. Maybe my utopia of sprawl for all is a bit too spread out to be a cohesive plan, but there must be some point in between that provides us all with a bit more elbow room and with the ability to let us say we are using our resources well . . .

Just some food for thought . . . Or to choke on . . .

?EUR??,,?(R)God Bless