If the idea of an “America” can be said to have been invented, it was done in the coastal string of great American urban corridor between Boston and Washington, and encoded into the DNA of cities whose collective and connected metropolitan areas are home to one of every ten citizens of the United States.

It was here I found the ideas used to decorate and propagate the American mythos enshrined not in the land itself, but in the colonnades and steel beams… urban playgrounds made just impermanent enough to let its populous experiment with America’s most progressive ideals: Massive public spaces like the DC’s National Mall and NY’s Central Park built for any and all to pursue retreat or reform; the campuses of our grandest educational pursuits in NJ’s Princeton and Connecticut’s Yale and the idealization of learning they’ve created; a fierce social sector like that in Baltimore driving a civic renaissance that’s rebuilding communities on behalf of people of color; extending the ideals of preservation beyond the natural and into the cultural, including Philadelphia’s over 67 national historic landmarks.

New York, America’s longest standing player on the international stage, and in many respects still its social and economic heartbeat, feels like a microcosm of the multi-cultural energy that helped a fledgling group of industrializing Atlantic cities become a super power. Where all roads once led to roam, now roads, trains, planes, and waterways pour citizens of the world into its islands and coast-lands that resemble next to zero of the natural world taken from the Lenape peoples, replacing it with a virtual republic of neighborhoods and ethnic enclaves that mirrors less the country than it does the world.