For Venice, however, we were in possession of an invitation to dinner at the Giudecca studio and long, broad, loft apartment of the English artist Geoffrey Humphries and his live-in, close companion from Seattle, Holly Snapp.
The great destruction of World War II made it possible for contemporary Kharkiv to be rebuilt as a city of broad streets, large apartment blocks, imposing, often ponderous administrative and office buildings, and large industrial plants.
These broad avenues of apartment blocks and shops, frequently contrived in Baroque fashion to create vistas converging on major public buildings, set a pattern that was widely followed in the expansion and modernization of European capital cities.
But neighborhood opposition has foiled the society's planned expansions in the past, including a 1984 proposal for a much broader 23-story apartment tower of limestone and granite, designed by the architect Hugh Hardy.
But there, outside his Greenwich Village apartment, the broad stripes and bright stars now hang.
Today it still has the broad avenues and modern apartment blocks dreamed up by planners from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but it also has extensive slums.
He looked like something out of "Death Wish" as he drove slowly past his Riverside Drive apartment in broad daylight, his bloodshot eyes darting from pedestrians to parked cars to old people sitting on park benches.
It was also less than helpful that the inexperienced fugitives -- U-boats," in Berlin slang, because they had gone underground -- surfaced much too often, leaving the apartment in broad daylight.
The same logic of urban renewal played out elsewhere in the city: Haussmann sought to check nearly a millennium of largely unplanned growth with the imposition of rectilinear street patterns and broad boulevards lined by apartment buildings with uniform facades and uniform height.
