On May 3, 2004, I sat down at the desk in my Rivington Street apartment, logged into Movable Type, and wrote the first post for a website that I'd only just decided to call Curbed instead of its previous working name, Blockhop. In the decade-plus that followed, I'd write 7,153 posts across what grew into the Curbed Network of sites, all composed here in the same glorious Movable Type window I'm staring at now. Hundreds of others would write tens of thousands more: as of this moment, the system tallies 642,192 total entries. Content, baby!
In a couple of hours, this door will be closed and latched for the last time, the final recently written bits — like this post — migrated to Curbed's new publishing platform in advance of a larger transformation that's about to see the light. Fittingly, that first post back in 2004 imagined a slew of descriptive slogans for Curbed; its current Editor-in-Chief, Kelsey Keith, will unveil a new, definitive one as part of the coming relaunch. We'll also bid adieu to the Curbed logo, designed by Khoi Uong. As in cities, so too in websites: all is change.
My thanks to 770 Broadway on Astor Place for standing in as Curbed's everybuilding for the last 12 years. And to Movable Type, for printing all the words. And to you, for reading them. Stick around. What comes next will be fun. —Lockhart Steele
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