Addison Del Mastro

1 week ago | thedeletedscenes.substack.com | Addison Del Mastro

My latest American Diary column in Discourse Magazine came out the other week, and this time I wrote a little more conceptually about how recording the history of old buildings—including the companies that built them, and the business or development patterns of which they were a part—is genuinely doing history. I’ve made this point before, but I like to make it once in awhile because it’s the deeper why to why I like to do this.

1 week ago | thedeletedscenes.substack.com | Addison Del Mastro

I want to throw out a few follow-up thoughts on my recent piece about small-format supermarkets, specifically touching on a few small-format stores in the D.C. area that were pretty new but went out of business. And I wonder in that piece how we can get back to having everyday retail scaled to urban neighborhoods instead of car-oriented suburban areas. I.e., smaller stores with smaller trade areas, that fit into the physical built environment of a city, or of a new mixed-use development.

2 weeks ago | thedeletedscenes.substack.com | Addison Del Mastro

I’ve been to the newish Wharf neighborhood in Washington, D.C. a couple of times—both times, as it happens, for the Greater Greater Washington spring gala. I had actually been here once before, in 2017, when the only notable thing along the water was a floating fish market made of several barges. We had some pretty affordable clams and oysters on the half shell, and it was interesting to be in this kind of liminal space 10 minutes from L’Enfant Plaza but kind of in the middle of…not much.

2 weeks ago | thedeletedscenes.substack.com | Addison Del Mastro

Let’s claim the term “prosocial”, The New Urban Order, Diana Lind, April 10, 2025This is a really interesting point, and maybe part of why “abundance” sounds elitist to a lot of people:For the past month, there has been a lot of discussion about Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book, Abundance, and whether the Abundance framework of high-return public investments and smart deregulatory reform will be one that can help Democrats win elections.

2 weeks ago | thedeletedscenes.substack.com | Addison Del Mastro

One of the things that happens when you own a house with a yard is you’ll see all sorts of alternative lawn and garden care tips. Many of them are illustrations: for example, showing the hungry bees wondering where all the dandelion flowers went that you killed with Roundup, or pictures of all the pretty butterfly larvae you might be killing by cleaning up your garden in the fall, or the fireflies you’re killing by picking up the leaves.