Apartment Look

LANSDALE >> Plans for a six- story apartment building on the corner of Third and Walnut streets have been revised again, and Lansdale officials look likely to be asked to approve several waivers for the project. Developer Ross Ziegler and architect Mike Rosen presented the latest version of those plans Monday night , describing changes including a new fence next to a dog park meant to buffer the building from its next door neighbors on Third Street. “In terms of both the fence and the dog park, we’d be open to discussions, certainly, to explore what would be more desirable, or how we can come up with solutions that might make more sense,” said Rosen. “We really want to encourage the concept of pet ownership, and taking care of their pets. And we clearly have been sensitive to the neighbor issue, and we will deal with it,” he said. The proposed Third and Walnut apartment building — termed “Walnut Crossing” on the plans — has been discussed since late 2015 by various borough b...

When our children were 11 and 9, young enough to still be entirely inside the family circle but old enough to remember, we splurged on a “once in a lifetime vacation ” and rented a small farmhouse in Southwestern France outside the village of Saint-Cyprien. Each day, our son and daughter would say goodbye to the donkey that hung around our patio and we’d climb in the tiny rented Renault and drive somewhere in the fairy- tale beautiful Dordogne River region . On one of these excursions, we stumbled on the provincial city of Sarlat. An accident of history and several centuries of stagnant economy had left Sarlat’s center virtually unchanged architecturally since the days of siege engines and knights galloping over drawbridges. City fathers had wakened one morning in the late 1950s to realize that, leaning above narrow and winding cobblestone streets and alleys, they had one of the largest collections of intact medieval architecture in Europe. The French government subsidized restor...