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Addison Del Mastro

@ad-mastro.bsky.social

1.2K followers 249 following 7.3K posts

Writing with a focus on urbanism, culture, and popular history. I write The Deleted Scenes, a daily, mostly-urbanism newsletter on Substack. a.delmastro2@gmail.com.

Posts Replies Media

Reposted by Addison Del Mastro

Rachel (ɹeɪt͡ʃəl) Taylor, envelope maker ✉️ @rachelvetica.bsky.social · 18h

I mean you can literally just eschew using GPS in the current day and find out what it's like to drive without it??

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 20h

These crazy things are collectible and worth real money now!

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Reposted by Addison Del Mastro

Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 @josephpolitano.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Sort of insane fact about how broken US urban planning is—America now spends more building *just the lights for roads and highways* than on all subways & ground mass transit combined Spending on roadway *pavement* is 18x transit spending

a graph of roadway and mass transit lights

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 20h

ChatGPT answer about a Kitchen Nightmares episode. "I was also sitting there" really this should not be allowed

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 23h

I don't exactly like the dour environmentalism that says we're too well off and have too much, but I do also kind of miss the days of being in college when the accumulation of stuff was a tiny and far less importance element of life

thedeletedscenes.com

In Suburbia, No One Can Hear You Clean

How college life created quiet logistical constraints against clutter

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This was fun to write, but I really mean it www.thedeletedscenes.com/p/in-suburbi...

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

College is, but isn’t only, a different life stage. It’s an environment with built-in logistical friction against owning and keeping a lot of stuff. That environment does a great deal of the work of buying and keeping only what you need for you.

thedeletedscenes.com

In Suburbia, No One Can Hear You Clean

How college life created quiet logistical constraints against clutter

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

In doing a bunch of organizing/decluttering in my house, I realized that the feeling of being paralyzed by too much stuff is only possible when you have the room to pack it away. I guess that's obvious, but I don't think we think about it like that

thedeletedscenes.com

In Suburbia, No One Can Hear You Clean

How college life created quiet logistical constraints against clutter

Reposted by Addison Del Mastro

Elizabeth Picciuto @epicciuto.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

At no point while reading this sentence did I correctly predict what was coming next.

Twitter screenshot: New: Kyrsten Sinema's ex-boyfriend and former bodyguard said he threw her paintings into her swimming pool in part because he felt disillusioned by her relationship with a major
U.S. Artificial Intelligence software developer amid the war in Gaza

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"Nothing is motivating you or forcing you from the outside to pare it down. The accumulation of stuff is a kind of mental tax that you pay in exchange for spare space."

thedeletedscenes.com

In Suburbia, No One Can Hear You Clean

How college life created quiet logistical constraints against clutter

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Clutter accumulates almost automatically when the marginal cost of packing away one more useless thing is basically zero, and when the friction point isn't "Do I have space?" but "Do I really need to decide if I need to keep it?"

thedeletedscenes.com

In Suburbia, No One Can Hear You Clean

How college life created quiet logistical constraints against clutter

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

There’s a reason I have this recurring thought when I drive through the countryside and small towns, that goes something like “Part of me wishes I were unsophisticated enough to be content with stuff that in reality I consider substandard.” www.thedeletedscenes.com/p/is-it-immo...

thedeletedscenes.com

Is It Immoral To Be A Foodie?

How do you retain gratitude while also having very high expectations?

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Some thoughts on how difficult it was to accumulate clutter in my college years versus now owning a house, and how the amount of free space you have hugely influences your relationship with stuff www.thedeletedscenes.com/p/in-suburbi...

thedeletedscenes.com

In Suburbia, No One Can Hear You Clean

How college life created quiet logistical constraints against clutter

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"College is, but isn’t only, a different life stage. It’s an environment with built-in logistical friction against owning and keeping a lot of stuff." Looking back, I kind of miss that.

thedeletedscenes.com

In Suburbia, No One Can Hear You Clean

How college life created quiet logistical constraints against clutter

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"You become inured to your own mess, your own shortcuts, your own weird complicated idiosyncrasies layered on top of other idiosyncrasies. Problems slowly morph into operating procedures that perpetuate themselves out of inertia."

thedeletedscenes.com

In Suburbia, No One Can Hear You Clean

How college life created quiet logistical constraints against clutter

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The more that is possible, the more you have to actively reject or decide against. And that is its own kind of invisible mental work, the less obvious consequence of lots of space and cheap stuff.

thedeletedscenes.com

In Suburbia, No One Can Hear You Clean

How college life created quiet logistical constraints against clutter

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Long-ish piece today on the background psychology of owning a house and having a lot of space, and how the ease of accumulating junk is a kind of flipside of the freedom to buy and own stuff

thedeletedscenes.com

In Suburbia, No One Can Hear You Clean

How college life created quiet logistical constraints against clutter

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"I’ve come to think of decluttering something like the way Protestants think about the Reformation, vis-à-vis medieval Catholicism."

thedeletedscenes.com

In Suburbia, No One Can Hear You Clean

How college life created quiet logistical constraints against clutter

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Today's piece, on accumulating junk and the difficulty of paring it down, as the flipside of spacious homes and cheap consumer goods (link in reply)

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is a thing you don’t have to do.

thedeletedscenes.com

In Suburbia, No One Can Hear You Clean

How college life created quiet logistical constraints against clutter

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"College life is actually a fairly good approximation of 'you will own nothing and be happy.' And curiously enough, we tend to be pretty happy during those years. Correlation is not causation, but it’s not nothing."

thedeletedscenes.com

In Suburbia, No One Can Hear You Clean

How college life created quiet logistical constraints against clutter

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

You will own a little and feel alright

thedeletedscenes.com

In Suburbia, No One Can Hear You Clean

How college life created quiet logistical constraints against clutter

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Some long thoughts on how the possibility of accumulating things quietly changes the incentives and makes it much harder to live simply

thedeletedscenes.com

In Suburbia, No One Can Hear You Clean

How college life created quiet logistical constraints against clutter

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"America’s 'great cities' are mostly just America’s surviving cities." thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/archive-di...

thedeletedscenes.substack.com

Archive Dive: When I Say "City," You Say...

A brief low point in American urbanism became an anti-urban ideology

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

"When I see a jumbo jet descending through the air, peeking out from behind the mid-rise office buildings, looking down on a million people from all the ends of the earth—I feel at home." Why Northern Virginia is very much a "real place":

thedeletedscenes.com

Northern Virginia Is a Real Place, Revisited

Feeling at home in a big, anonymous place

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I always misspell "laminarity"

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

One interesting thing about using newspaper archives for research is that a lot of stuff has really never made it to the indexed, searchable internet. There is absolutely no trace of this central Jersey burger brand on the internet!

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I don't know why but these are all for one business and they're some of the funniest/weirdest online reviews I've come across. Those grocery stores!

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It’s kind of like a game of architectural hide and seek. It’s also a little ride through America’s open-air architectural public domain.

thedeletedscenes.com

Gino’s In A Bottle

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #284

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Gino’s must be one of the most common recycled/adapted chain/brand buildings after Pizza Hut. There are so many of them, most just barely disguised!

thedeletedscenes.com

Gino’s In A Bottle

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #284

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Steakhouse at home night (chuck eye roast/"poor man's ribeye" slow roasted and then seared on grill, nice Virginia red blend)

Reposted by Addison Del Mastro

Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Me, when someone suggests my iced coffee is unprofessional

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Well, but then I wouldn’t be me

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Tonkatsu night!

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

This typo I made in an essay draft feels like some kind of Freudian slip

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

A great deal of what manifests itself as hostility or disagreement is the failure to articulate an underlying point of view. That makes it too easy to caricature the other side, to imagine that they don’t even have an underlying point of view.

thedeletedscenes.com

Gatekeeping And Freeloading, Tube TVs And Iced Coffees

Is one the answer to the other, and can you really tell if you’re seeing either?

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Also a little bit about the iced coffee discourse

thedeletedscenes.com

Gatekeeping And Freeloading, Tube TVs And Iced Coffees

Is one the answer to the other, and can you really tell if you’re seeing either?

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I wish there were more curiosity on the part of people in the middle of a disagreement. More of a tendency to put down being an enforcer, or to try to be clever, or to assume everyone is just coming at you with their narrow agenda.

thedeletedscenes.com

Gatekeeping And Freeloading, Tube TVs And Iced Coffees

Is one the answer to the other, and can you really tell if you’re seeing either?

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Maybe you can flip the freeloader charge: the folks refusing to acknowledge that their hobby is going mainstream enough to push prices higher than they’d like are actually the freeloaders.

thedeletedscenes.com

Gatekeeping And Freeloading, Tube TVs And Iced Coffees

Is one the answer to the other, and can you really tell if you’re seeing either?

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

On hobbyists, etiquette, and the tension between the people who know and the people who don’t

thedeletedscenes.com

Gatekeeping And Freeloading, Tube TVs And Iced Coffees

Is one the answer to the other, and can you really tell if you’re seeing either?

000

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I apologize, we are not currently taking reservations

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I've been messing around seeing how these AIs mark up one of my articles. ChatGPT almost always starts with a variation of this!

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

One day, maybe, this Latin American bakery may feel as solid and immovable as the Italian Inn must have felt in the 1990s or 2000s—as if it had always been there.

thedeletedscenes.com

Is There Any Italian In(n) Here?

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #283

Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

So much of the normal, unremarkable churn of the built environment is really the long, slow unfolding of the story of a place. One day, it will be history.

thedeletedscenes.com

Is There Any Italian In(n) Here?

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #283

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I’ll never stop feeling that living in this region of our country, I am lucky to see this organic, textured process of places and people making and remaking themselves.

thedeletedscenes.com

Is There Any Italian In(n) Here?

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #283

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

In this conversion from one immigration-driven business to another, we’re not seeing the loss of culture; we’re seeing the same dynamic process by which that old Italian restaurant came down to us, happening right now.

thedeletedscenes.com

Is There Any Italian In(n) Here?

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #283

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

In a lot of ways, though it doesn’t feel like it now, Italian restaurants were the “ethnic cuisine” of their day, much as Chinese, Thai, or Indian food are today. A place like this was a living relic of an older moment in American history and culture.

thedeletedscenes.com

Is There Any Italian In(n) Here?

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #283

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The slow, partial return of medium-sized discount department stores, in the 50k to 80k square foot range, is a really interesting development in brick-and-mortar retail, and has a lot of implications.

thedeletedscenes.com

The Discount Department Store Missing Middle

The subtle importance of the “medium-format” discount department store

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Perhaps we’ve gotten near the saturation point for these suburban megastores, and are rediscovering—albeit with a new name and conceptual frame that was not necessary in an earlier time—an old normal for the discount department store category.

thedeletedscenes.com

The Discount Department Store Missing Middle

The subtle importance of the “medium-format” discount department store

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

There’s a fascinating rediscovery/reinvention of a “retail missing middle here,” in this 75,000-square-foot suburban Target store in New Jersey. This was once a common size for discount department stores.

thedeletedscenes.com

The Discount Department Store Missing Middle

The subtle importance of the “medium-format” discount department store

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