Baristanet, the Montclair/Glen Ridge, NJ blog that inspired and mentored OTBKB, made it into the New York Times. A new feature charts the town’s changing architectural landscape. Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times piece.

On Sept. 22, the Web site started a new feature to chart the town’s
changing architectural landscape — an interactive map that shows
teardowns, homes with historic designations and recent construction.

“Maybe
something like this will give people pause,” said Ms. George, 39, in
her office at her gracious 100-year-old home. “Knowing you’re having
your house on the teardown map, knowing it will be part of this trend,
I don’t think it has a positive implication.”

The teardown
issue has taken on a sense of urgency here after a developer bought the
blue-shuttered Colonial-style house, on North Mountain Avenue, for
$870,000 last fall and demolished it this summer with plans to build
six town homes. The action led town officials to rezone about 200 lots
— including the North Mountain Avenue property — from a designation
that allows up to eight units on a single lot to a designation that
allows only two. The developer has since dropped his plans and has put
the empty lot up for sale.

“The fear is that teardowns, in a
long-established community with little space for new development, are
slowly changing Montclair’s character and ambiance,” Ms. George wrote
on the Web site.

“Longtime residents often say the Montclair
they knew has changed,” she continued, adding that she envisions the
online map as serving as “an evolving document chronicling change in
Montclair.”

A similar interactive map on WestportNow, a news Web
site in Westport, Conn., inspired the Montclair site, Ms. George said.
On that site, the “Teardown of the Day” feature includes photographs of
construction equipment razing Cape Cods, ramshackle ranches and
architectural gems.