Suburban superstores can and should adapt to urban environments such as Manhattan. The writer says the new Home Depot in Chelsea is a good model:

The new Home Depot, which has 105,000 square feet in a basement, ground floor and atrium, has the right components of a street-smart store: home delivery; bus and subway nearby; no parking but help hailing taxis; and interesting windows that seek to attract pedestrians passing by. Offices occupy the upper floors. All these elements are not dissimilar to the great retail emporiums before suburban malls sucked them out of Main Streets everywhere.

K-Mart, on the other hand, has a lot to learn:

Kmart, for example, opened on 34th Street in 1996 but instead of offering eye-catching displays for the thousands who walk past it every day, the windows look onto cash registers, wheelchairs and shopping carts. And while Kmart, to its credit, also opened in the old Wanamaker’s Department Store on Astor Place – a smart reuse of another old department store that even has a subway-level entrance – there are no street-friendly windows.

A short, interesting piece.

The New York Times endorses Kerry for President. Not a surprise, of course, but I enjoy reading the Times’s endorsement every four years because it’s a nice summing-up of things.

Three-fourths of the editorial is actually an indictment of the Bush presidency — only a fourth of it is about Kerry. Ordinarily, that might be damning. But in 2004, I really don’t care.

We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted. Time and again, history invited George W. Bush to play a heroic role, and time and again he chose the wrong course. We believe that with John Kerry as president, the nation will do better.

Voting for president is a leap of faith. A candidate can explain his positions in minute detail and wind up governing with a hostile Congress that refuses to let him deliver. A disaster can upend the best-laid plans. All citizens can do is mix guesswork and hope, examining what the candidates have done in the past, their apparent priorities and their general character. It’s on those three grounds that we enthusiastically endorse John Kerry for president.

This year, that’s good enough for me.

[Related: The Times’s endorsement of Al Gore, four years ago.]

The New Yorker likes “Jack & Bobby.” Me too.

Cool.