"It wasn't my idea."

Byzantium's Shores discusses some mis-steps in reinvigorating his local downtown and in passing inadvertently gives me far more credit than I deserve. I thank him but I must demur. He writes:

The town in which I live, Orchard Park, has recently been expending a lot of effort to make its village center a lot more attractive. (Orchard Park is a fairly affluent suburb of Buffalo. It happens to be the town where Ralph Wilson Stadium is located, and thus, a lot of Buffalo Bills players end up living here.) They've built new sidewalks, planted flower beds and commissioned sculptures along the main streets, given pretty much every building a fresh coat of paint, and in one case even demolished a crappy 1960s era building that had been on the town's main streetcorner and replaced it with an attractive building of red brick that actually blends in with the older style buildings around it, including the 1910-era red brick building across the street. I don't know if they've read David Sucher's book City Comforts, but they seem to be putting a lot of his ideas into practice: building to the sidewalk, putting parking behind the buildings, putting a lot of benches about for people to sit, et cetera.(italics added--DS)

I'm flattered but I must nip in the bud even an inadvertent over-credit. These are not my ideas. They are my observations. Big difference and though use of the term by Byzantium's Shores was passing, throw-off usage, for the record I would not want to be accused of claiming these physical ideas. My suggestions about cities are not a priori but post hoc --- not beforehand as a matter of theory about how things should be but observations (along with several tens of thousands of other people) about how things actually are arranged in great urban environments.

"It wasn't my idea." I just shoot the pictures.