Community of Choice Archives • FAUX REAL THO

FAUX REAL THO

The Map Collective: Your Favorite Place in Town

Google Maps lets you carve out meaning in your geography. With a good map, you can fly around and view all the different sites shared by friends and strangers. I love how you can tell a story in — or laid on — the place it took place. Your assignment, should you choose to accept…

Mystery! Intrigue! Food!: A Night with Pop-Up Lafayette

To get an invite to the hottest dining spot in town, you have to know people. If you’re lucky enough to know people, you then have to follow a series of instructions to get a ticket. It’s a limited seating event, in a secret location, thrown by a secret group of chefs who want to…

Riffing with Dave Bangert

A few weeks ago, Journal & Courier Opinions page editor Dave Bangert conducted an interview with yours truly to delve deeper into how Think Lafayette fits into the new Community of Choice era. He honed in on the idea that we are a love letter to Lafayette, a celebration of what we get right and an…

Behind Signage, City Code, Street Art, and the Banana House

At question this month in West Lafayette is the sudden presence of the “banana house” and whether or not it should be allowed to stay or if it must go. Many locals in local media turned out with lots of opinions about the banana house: some grumbled about graffiti and street art in highly visible…

Beginner’s Guide to Lafayette: Purdue University Campus

So you want to see Purdue campus? You want to be literate in the highlights of Purdue culture? This is a beginner’s guide to the Purdue University campus in West Lafayette, Indiana. You must see the following, red brick and all. View Beginner’s Guide to Purdue University Campus in a larger map See a Game…

view of Lafayette, Indiana from the Myers Pedestrian Bridge

Indiana Insider’s Trip to Lafayette

Some of us are bittersweet enough about the GLA to wonder why someone would ever vacation here as a tourist. This fall, a family with the Indiana Insider blog did just that. On a three-day-two-night vacation, they visited Wolf Park, Bruno’s Pizza, the Farmer’s Market, McCord’s Candies, the Lafayette Brewing Co., Arni’s, Red Seven, the…

Gallery: Scenes From the Main Street Family Mash

This weekend Bicycle Lafayette hosted their first event, the Main Street Family Mash, a mass bike ride for all ages through downtown Lafayette, in conjunction with the Fall Riverside Bike Polo Tournament. The Lafayette Police Department helped with the ride and Lafayette Mayor Tony Roswarski came out to support the event. Photos were kindly donated…

Can a Music Video Make Your City Desirable?

Fort Wayne, Indiana, has been on the bad end of some press lately, from being named the fattest and dumbest city in the nation, to the most riddled with cholesterol. Ouch. This, along with the ever-present issue of brain drain, inspired a promotional campaign that pulled together the city’s hip-hop scene to make a video…

Thanks Again, Forbes!

Forbes magazine has once again recognized the Lafayette area as a community of choice, this time as #15 in a list of the best small cities for business and careers, measuring job growth, education ranks, and cost of doing business metrics. We come in right between Johnson City, TN, and Sioux City, IA. Earlier this…

Seeking A Cure for Brain Drain

Earlier this month, we were proud to report that Lafayette, Indiana, was ranked among the top smartest cities in the United States. We could conclude that our scores were artificially high because of the number of students represented in the area, but their findings controlled for age and thus they believe that the number of…

A Bridge, A Rainbow, and a McCommunity of Choice

After avoiding the heat and the crowd at the Taste of Tippecanoe for a couple of years, I was pleasantly surprised at the size of the event and the mix of folks it drew to the downtown district last Saturday. It was a good time — there was a lot to see, tons of food,…

Lafayette Area Ranked 2nd Smartest In the Nation

Richard Florida reports that Lafayette, Indiana, ranks as one of America’s top brainiest cities. It’s true, we’re wicked smart. This study used gaming software called Lumosity (think the computer games that you use to procrastinate when you should be compiling your TPS reports) to measure not only how we perform on tests, but how we…