"But still, the road is more than just a thoroughfare that takes you from Point A to Point B. It's a source of pride.
It bounced and lurched over the rutted pavement of Canal Street, the open market of a thoroughfare that serves SoHo, Chinatown and the Lower East Side.
When Dr. Dobelle assumed the leadership of Trinity College in 1995 he was acutely aware of the symbolism of the barrier that had just been erected across Vernon Street, in effect making it a road open only to the college community rather than the city thoroughfare it had always been.
The postwar boom made it a thriving middle-class area with plenty of high-wage manufacturing jobs, and some of the Camaros that came off the local GM plant's assembly line rolled right out onto Van Nuys Boulevard as the broad thoroughfare became the center of L.A.'s car culture.
The Chechen capital is now intersected by wide, grassy boulevards (especially the main thoroughfare, now called Prospect Putin) and fountains spray arcs of water lit by colored lamps, making it a surreally pleasant place to take a stroll.
That makes it an outlier.
The Museum of Modern Art lobby — that awkward space designed by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi — spans a city block, making it as much a thoroughfare as a museum entrance.
And at Illinois Park Forestt Mall, near Chicago, Sears and other big stores were razed about 10 years ago to make way for a Main Street thoroughfare that includes a town green, residential units and a series of smaller stores.
Brooklyn, for all its shameless self-promotion, lacks those instantly recognisable buildings and legendary thoroughfares – the Empire State Building, Grand Central Station, the Great White Way – that make it clear precisely what is being smashed to pieces, and where.
It is bisected by a long thoroughfare that used to be called Rue 7 Novembre, in remembrance of the day that Ben Ali came to power; locals now refer to it as Mohamed Bouazizi Avenue.
