As usual one of the things that floors me the most about being in Europe are the Great Doors. We simply don’t have great, big wooden doors like you see in Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Geneva (and countless others—those are just the cities we’ve been in this month so far). Painted, unpainted, stained, decaying, preserved. Ten, twelve, sixteen feet tall. There are perfectly understandable reasons we don’t have Great Doors in New York and Chicago, let alone Peoria and Los Angeles. But boy do I love to walk past and look at these Great Doors.
To our credit, I love and miss (when I’m in Europe) the (largely) accessible sidewalks, the spaciousness, and the Burnham grids of our country.