My Grand Day Out: owa River Landing and the Peninsula Neighborhood

The Landing: Apartments with first floor retail, Iowa River LandingTen years ago, Ben Kaplan criticized Coralville's Iowa River Landing development as having the design of an urban area but without the connection to or from other places that is essential to urbanism: Iowa River Landing is not well connected to anything outside of Iowa River Landing. While, from certain angles, the place looks urban, it's really just a glorified shopping mall with very expensive condos and apartments perched above.East 2nd Avenue shops and street parkingToday, Iowa River Landing remains easy to send up. It's a faux urbanist shopping mall of a type I've seen in other places as well. The streets are narrow and relatively quiet even amidst crowds of shoppers, but the handsome brick buildings are full of high-end franchises. LuLuLemon is next to Anthropologie is next to J. Jill. (Do I understand what I have just written? Reader, I do not. Maybe you could try Google Translate?)View from Midnight Coffee:…