There's no such thing as too many restaurants, unless you'e a restaurant. And even then.

In Manhattan, there's a section of the Lower East Side that's nothing but Indian restaurants for a solid block. You'd think that would be unsustainable, but it's been that way for years. Same goes for Little Italy, Chinatown to some degree, and 'Broadway Row' which is solid wall to wall eateries.

Same thing happened in Hoboken, which used to be all bars (you could get a hamburger, that's as far as it went). Now most of the bars are restaurants.

What happens is that these areas become destinations unto themselves. At some point, they achieve a critical mass so that what the indiviual eateries lose in competition they more than gain in traffic.

The choice and competition is good for consumers. The traffic draw these areas create when they become 'destinations' is good for individual restaurants. When these things can be made to work, everyone wins.

It's certainly played out that way here. What we know today as "Bricktown" used to be an old warehouse district on the wrong side of the tracks from downtown. Way back in the 1980s, there was exactly one eatery out there. In '89, the Spaghetti Warehouse opened up to record crowds. Others followed, slowly at first, more quickly once they saw that the traffic was there. And with space in Bricktown now running short, there's spillover back into downtown proper.

Excellent. What good urban planning would suggest now is to squeeze out 'dead' areas (parking lots and garages) and encourage people to leave their cars and walk. Not for miles, just a block or two. As I've said before, this is why I support Robotic Parking, which creates automated parking areas featuring a maximum of convenience and a minimum of dead spaces. (They're a client, so full disclosure. But then again, I pick my clients, and this one's a winner - over 100 projects are now planned in NYC alone, and hundreds more are going up around the world in the next few years.) I believe leaving cars on the street is a practice as archaic as the horses and buggies cars replaced. As much as possible, streets and sidewalks need to belong to pedestrians. People want to congregate - not all the time of course - but they have an instinctive urge to see, be seen, rub shoulders, and interact casually. Cities that facilitate this need, succeed. Jobs, land values, public safety, etc., flow from this basic foundation.

It takes amazingly little 'vision' on the part of public officials to achieve this, which is a good thing, since so few elected officials demonstrate much vision anyway. The free market can take care of much of the job as long as there are rules and infrastructure in place to build upon.

All Hoboken had going for it was (1) inspired urban planning by the town's founder (and original owner), the engineer John Stevens, and (2) a unique proximity to Manhattan. Bad government in the years since tried mightily to kill the town, but despite this it has thrived in the past two decades. These are great times for urban areas with anything going for them.

Locals from the 'burbs who come to Bricktown invariably fret: "Where am I going to park?" Not used to this sort of thing, they aren't. I don't know if this has actually hurt Harkins, which runs a multiplex moviehouse downtown. It shouldn't have — you park in such-and-such a lot, and Harkins validates — but what's second nature to some of us is the most unheard-of thing they ever heard of. Heck, we have (some) parking meters that take credit cards now.