The emperor might have beautiful clothes, but what about the shoes?

By 21^st century standards, it would seem like a moot point that buildings in high density downtowns would attempt to have at least some street level engagement, meaning that the ground floor offers something for passers-by to look at beyond a mere blank wall.  Usually this translates to a large window for a display that correlates to the activity inside, and since most people in big cities do not want their private lives to be a stage, residential uses on downtown ground floors are not typically very desirable.  However, most businesses—particularly retail—find it not only desirable but advantageous that pedestrians and motorists can easily peer into their establishments: the only thing better than a good window is an equally conspicuous door nearby.  Thus, many buildings that may otherwise house residences, offices, or even covered parking on the upper levels will still have a gregarious ground floor that establishes a dialogue with the street.  Sometimes the “foot” of the building is the most heavily ornamented, while all the other floors between the foundation and the cornice are a bit more austere or conventional.

A survey of any older downtown district confirms this phenomenon, such as the photo below from Roanoke, Virginia:

 

This perfectly conventional building from, most likely, the latter half of the 19^th century was ubiquitous across American cities up until around 1960.  The dichotomy of large, retail-oriented windows on the ground floor and smaller, more private fenestration on each upper level was a standard building typology of that time.

But it all changed concurrent with the decentralization of American cities after World War II.  Automobile ownership was already advancing rapidly beforehand, with the brief exception of the first few years of the Depression (and after 1933, vehicles per capita in the US resumed climbing, despite the persisting economic malaise).  After the surrender of Japan, American soldiers returned home to take advantage of the GI Bill and moved with their sweethearts to a brand-new house in what was probably farmland before they left to fight the Axis Powers.  Then, together, they commenced in an unprecedented babymaking celebration.  A surge in the economy, the population, the rate of homeownership, and private automobiles culminated in the emergence of a new way of life in which downtowns were increasingly less critical for daily routines.  By the time the overwhelming majority of households owned vehicles in the 1950s, old downtowns were not only passé, the physical form was downright inconvenient.  Floorspace in these old buildings wasn’t large enough for the logistical improvements that allowed for supermarkets.  Living above or in close proximity to work was unnecessary thanks to cars.  Small yards in the homes close to downtown put people unappealingly close to their neighbors.  Downtown streets could not begin to accommodate the level of parking available in a typical shopping mall, out around the cheaper land near all the new housing.

In the 1950s and 60s, urban retail didn’t just evolve in its physical form; the old typology almost completely collapsed.  The most outdated old buildings fell vacant and into disrepair; city leaders often demolished them to offer better parking opportunities in an attempt to bolster downtowns’ accessibility.  New structures often needed so much parking that it had to be stacked on the first few stories, below the office uses.  And since downtown parking demand outpaced the need for these surviving urban structures to offer goods and services, the newest generation of buildings turned away from the streets, reducing or eliminating visible displays or entrances.  Quite a few downtown buildings in the mid 20^th century oriented themselves toward a parking garage, built to one side, connected to another block by a skyway, or perhaps underground.  Meanwhile the street and sidewalk merely hosted service vehicle access or fire escapes, but no primary entrance.

For many readers of this blog, a description of the cataclysmic shift in urban design over fifty years is unwarranted, but even for the unacquainted, it doesn’t take much to get the idea across.  I could provide dozens examples of civic buildings, office towers, parking garages, or even shopping centers that features flout this disregard for city streets and sidewalks, but a particular structure comes to mind for its critical place within its city’s landscape.

Lake Point Tower in Chicago, viewed from the lake in the center of the above photo, is among the city’s most iconic buildings: at the time of its development, the 70-story structure was the tallest residential tower in the world.  To this day, it remains the only Chicago highrise that sits to the east of Lake Shore Drive, on a promontory that also includes the city’s famed tourist attraction, Navy Pier, visible in the lower right corner.  It bears a more than passing resemblance to the Spartan elegance associated with Chicago’s favorite (adopted) architect son, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose Second Chicago School of thought during his tenure at the Illinois Institute of Technology exerted a profound influence on the cityscape during middle of the 20^th Century.  The similarities between Lake Point Tower and the work of Mies should come as no surprise; its architects were among his students.  Different vantage points reinforce the distinctive status of this edifice in relation to the waterfront and neighboring highrises.

The structure borrows heavily from Mies’ Bauhaus movement origins, which deliberately sought to avoid engagement with the landscape or local vernacular in an attempt (at least to some degree) to transcend it; thus it earned the uncomfortable nickname “International Style”.  Though the style fell out of favor in the last quarter of the 20^th century for exuding more than a whiff of elitism, the disassociation with place and regional culture certainly gives Lake Point Tower a majesty that underlies the luxury of the residential units inside.  And if it seems regal now, one can only imagine what it looked like when first constructed 45 years ago.  In 1968, it felt even more like an island: Chicago’s central business district was declining, as was the case across the country.  While the city’s above-average public transit system precluded the need for as many parking lots and garages as most Midwestern cities, much of the central city struggled to retain offices and shops, let alone residences.  Lake Point Tower was a risky enterprise—a relative orphan in the Streeterville neighborhood, capitalizing on remarkable multi-directional views of both the Loop and the skyline.  After the residential boom that began in Streeterville and other parts of Chicago’s CBD in the 1980s, Lake Point Tower stopped seeming so lonely.  But the evidence remains powerful of the time period in which it was conceived.  While it often looks fantastic from the water or zipping by on Lake Shore Drive to its west, the other, more pedestrian scaled access roads paint a different picture:

Nothing but a big blank wall across most of the Illinois Street frontage, with the exception of a tiny convenience-type retail opening at the green awning.  The Grand Avenue frontage on the north side of the tower is much the same way: virtually no engagement with the street.  Pedestrians have virtually nothing to look at as they walk by, which might not be such a concern if it were a particularly sleepy or attractionless part of town.  But it isn’t.  Throngs gather at Navy Pier just a block to the east, particularly when the weather is nice.

Thus, the designers of Lake Point Tower missed out on a critical opportunity to divert the attention of passers-by.  Pedestrians in the area, many of which are tourists, would easily have patronized shops and restaurants along Illinois Street or Grand Avenue, so it perfectly embodies a failure to capitalize on the commercial possibilities afforded by this premier urban location.

In the tower’s defense, it is a product of its time.  The architects did not take the designs of pre-war commercial buildings to heart, because in 1968, they were by and large irrelevant.  Lake Point Tower was an investment risk when central cities across the nation hemorrhaged jobs, burned-out swathes reminded everyone of escalating social unrest, and both petty and crime increasingly dominated the news headlines.  Downtown Chicago had plenty of highrises in 1968, but it could not boast a great number of residential high-rises.  Many people living downtown back then were looking for ways out.  Thus, this tower responded to the social climate by turning inward.  It still offers the luxuries its target demographic would expect—a pool, park, playground, shops and restaurants—but they first (and sometimes exclusively) serve the residents under the shared roof.  Dwellers of this tower could function for days without leaving the building’s grounds; an elevator would be all they need. The gourmet restaurants might attract outsiders in order to break even, but they cannot rely on display windows for promotion, and the outside world that chooses to patronize them will probably get there by car.

Lake Point Tower is hardly unworthy of its pivotal role along the Chicago lakefront, as well as its many firsts.  But from an urban design standpoint, its imperfections create what almost amounts to blight on the streetscape.  It may still be luxurious, but it did not place among the top 10 priciest condo buildings last year, and as Streeterville and Near North neighborhoods have invited dozens of other luxury high-rise condo, apartment and hotel developments in the ensuing decades since 1968, most subsequent towers have consciously engaged with the street and sidewalk, as evidenced by the photo below:

Developers have nothing to gain by pasting a blank wall across the ground floor of their buildings, and these days, most new construction recognizes this, even in downtowns with less of an active street life than Chicago.  Many cities remain too decentralized to warrant a store-lined first floor on every downtown street—after all, the suburbs remain the retail hub for most of metropolitan America, despite some recentralizing activity in the last twenty years.  However, most architects, developers, and city planners know better than allow blank walls to permeate new construction; a superficial window display with public art or an advertisement still offers a vast improvement.  Lake Point Tower will probably remain a Chicago icon for decades to come, but its admirers will reserve their kindest words when describing it—and viewing it—from a distance.

Drive-thru service...to (or at) your door.

One of the most intense work months of my career has just come to an end, and it's been obvious that it has prevented me from devoting as much time and thought to my already meager average of two blog posts a month. And I conclude September with another short(ish) post on an observation I made during a visit to Chicago, just days before I left the country for this job in Afghanistan.

It's inevitable that trendy neighborhoods such as Lakeview, where I took the pictures from this series, will attract restaurants with an understanding of the pulse of urbanity. These shrewd entrepreneurs recognize that busy foot traffic on the sidewalks is not just free publicity but also an opportunity to expand their gross leasable area ever so slightly. For every party seeking a private meal in the restaurant's darkest, most anonymous corner, another will specifically stake out the extroverted front row seats, to increase the likelihood of chance encounters with friends from the neighborhood. It fits with the coveted lifestyle of the young professional as a Lakeview yuppie fits in the seat of a Volkswagen Jetta. And what better way to maximize the chance of lassoing passers-by into the coruscating dinner conversation than by getting them before they even make it into the door of the restaurant? Thus, witness the al fresco dining options.

If the sidewalk were broad and expansive, the owners of each restaurant could probably seek a permit for the city with much more artistic license—something that allowed a greater variety of seating arrangements, some waist-high partitions, maybe some tiki torches or other mood lighting at night, perhaps even a space for a roving musician. Obviously that's not likely to be the case on this street, where an restaurateur instead must take advantage of every square inch that he or she can get during Chicago's inevitably limited al fresco dining season; not much more than one-third of the year is warm enough. The outdoor dining configuration must fall within the allowable parameters set by the city, not to interfere with pedestrian accessibility or general safety.

But, judging from the photo of the streetscape here, the City of Chicago gives quite a bit of leeway for sidewalk amenities. It appears that these improvements, whether they include the setback for al fresco dining, or bike racks, or street trees, or potted plants—all of them can claim more than fifty percent of the width of the sidewalk—the total right of way. Pedestrians can't pass more than two shoulder-to-shoulder. Quite generous for the diners and restaurant owners, and my suspicion is that the city's planners conceived these dimensions with the hopes of further stimulating pedestrian vitality in the area by catering to them so much, then forcing them close together. The fence for the outdoor dining tables may not offer any visual privacy, which isn't a problem, since customers who would choose to eat here would have few qualms about being seen by as many people as possible. However, the fence does clearly demarcate a space which its users can clearly appropriate through the duration of the meal. And it provides an attractive mount for hanging plants and flowers. The restaurant's al fresco probably only caters to two deuces—just four people—but the owners prove that they value those potential customers by the amount they have invested towards gussying it up. The resulting arrangement seems to work for everyone: the business operators get to add a few more seats, the city gets the enhanced sense of pedestrian energy that drives up real estate (and, thus, tax revenue), the restaurant's patrons get all the seating options that they can hope for.

But one party still loses: the motorists.

For all they've been able to stuff onto the sidewalk, the interplay is problematic. The al freso diners could reach out and slap the car while remaining seated at their table. And while the driver may not have a problem with this arrangement, the passenger side sure gets a bum deal.

They're stuck. No real options if you park at this space. In this particular situation, the cars seem to fall last in the pecking order. For the militant urbanist, this isn't a problem, of course: cars are the problem, and we defenders of city living should never try to accommodate them at the expense of a healthy walking environment. After all, it's quite an improvement from the sidewalk fencing in downtown Chicago that I blogged about awhile ago, which clearly did nothing more than impede pedestrians' ability to cross the street on a particular side of the intersection.

But I'm not a militant urbanist, and I can recognize the need for a less lopsided arrangement. These images reveal a real predicament for a driver, and while this might seem like an isolated incident, I'd be be willing to bet the farm (or the entire slow food movement, in this case) that Lincoln Square, Lakeview, Lincoln Park, Roscoe Village, Wrigleyville, etc etc etc have plenty more examples where the the powers that be have rammed the puzzle pieces together. Cars park and the passenger can't get out because of an impediment on the sidewalk. The fact remains that this is on-street parking we're impinging upon here—the most spatially efficient kind, the easiest to integrate to a pedestrian/bicycle heavy environment, and, in many parts of Chicago, the only option on that block. Is it really in the best interest of the city to allow a streetscape improvement that effectively maims the adjacent parking spots? Sure, it won't affect the driver of the car featured in the above photos. But in a dense environment like Chicago, where parking is never that easy, cars are more likely to have a passenger (or two or three) than a typical vehicle seeking a parking space in a huge lot in suburban, car-friendly Schaumburg.

Thus, the conductor of this urban symphony failed to perceive all that forces that make the counterpoint here so delicate. I'm hardly pointing out a crisis here. It may never need intervention through new codes or revisions to the permitting process; let's hope it doesn't. The restaurant owners may soon discover the problem that these fences pose, and they may decide that it's better not to antagonize drivers seeking parking on the street right outside their window. But this arrangement demonstrates that pushing heavily in one ideological direction only results in the other agent responding with a push back, or even an antagonistic tug. Urban environments can be just as hostile to drivers as the suburbs are accused of being toward pedestrians. Streetscape improvements have the opportunity for enhancing value in a huge, largely successful metropolis just as much as they do in a neglected small town, but calibration with the scale, an awareness of the context, and a sensitivity to the consequences are all critical. This observation has about as much complexity as arguing that a dish can be seasoned too heavily, or, by contrast, it might not be seasoned enough—gosh, what an insight. Yet the most obvious juxtapositions often pass us right by, until, lo and behold, a passenger has to climb across the driver's seat to get out of the car. “Take that, Lexus-owning yuppies,” retorts the militant. “Even worse than a Jetta.” May the cooler heads prevail.

Making it hot to be wired, Part II: A city’s barriers to clearing the cable clutter.

My apologies for the long lapse of time between Part I and Part II, but the act of collecting photos proved more challenging than I expected. In my previous post for this series, I briefly deconstructed the pros and cons of overhead electric wires, which offer the least expensive means of safely transmitting current, but at the cost of vulnerability to high winds and fallen trees, as well as the obvious visual disarray. Undergrounding the cables eliminates the unsightliness while protecting the transmission from interruptions after heavy storms, but broken underground circuits are harder to detect and costlier to repair. Most arguments on the relocation of cables usually reach a stalemate, but aesthetic interests nearly always favor their burial. Most suburban subdivisions built in the past thirty to forty years have adapted to an underground electrical network. Only in the most rural and low density developments will the marginal cost for undergrounding each housing unit rise to such levels that a developer cannot pass the expense to clientele and still produce a marketable product.

The visibility of electrical infrastructure has become spatially polarized. It often appears that “modern” American subdivisions operate in a world without overhead wires. (The only wires typically straddle the edge of the neighborhood, along collector streets that allow entry to our wireless domestic enclaves.) The central cores of most cities—the historic downtowns—usually also enjoy sufficient density of electrical use to justify undergrounding. However, everything between the downtown and the suburbs of America’s historic cities—in short, the “inner city”—is replete with cables, wooden poles, and pylons. The concept of undergrounding scarcely existed at the time when these older urban neighborhoods were fashionable. By the 1970s, when undergrounding for new construction first became prevalent, the investment cost in burying wires in these mature communities hardly seemed worthwhile, since the middle class was fleeing them in droves. Now that the majority of Americans live in suburbs, one could argue that a preponderance of residential communities in which people live have underground cables, even though the overwhelming majority of land coverage—the inner city and the vast stretches of rural settlements—remain dependent on overhead wires.


The configuration of overhead electric systems in New Orleans, my featured city, hardly differs from most other places: the downtown and newest suburban subdivisions have them buried, while hardly anything else does. But the “undergrounded” portions of the city seem particularly small, and many areas that one would typically expect to feature buried cables remain triumphantly elevated a hundred feet above street level. Convention Center Boulevard stretches across the edge of the city’s Warehouse District, which rests fully within the boundaries of the Downtown Development District. Yet it has overhead cables of a magnitude and prominence that one would only expect to see along a major highway in the outlying metro area. Just look in either direction:

They’re huge. Intimidating, even—and taller than many of the three-story commercial buildings in the area.

But how do they rate as a logical means of circulating electricity throughout the region, considering the constraints imposed by the city’s climate? New Orleans struggles with its propensity to suffer powerful, hurricane induced winds. After all, Hurricane Katrina left over 80% of the city without power for months. One might think that either the Department of Public Works or the private utility providers would seek to underground more of the wires. But most of the city rests below sea level, and essentially all of it sits in a floodplain, making the buried wires equally susceptible to soil saturation. Any lawyerly investigator would naturally respond: “Cities in Holland, such as Amsterdam, found a way to bury the overhead wires, even though they sit below sea level. So why can’t New Orleans do it and help minimize power outages after major storms?” The simplest answer would be that Amsterdam—and all of the Netherlands—has installed a complex flood protection system that essentially shields them from the North Sea tidal surges, so that only a natural force once every 50,000 years is likely to cause flooding. In short, Amsterdam could enjoy buried cables because it has virtually eliminated the chances of water intrusion. When the Army Corps of Engineers’ upgrades to New Orleans’ levees and pumping stations are complete, the city should experience a 1% chance of flooding each year—an astronomically higher risk than Amsterdam. And this is the city’s aspiration in a post-Katrina landscape. Because of its subtropical latitude and proximity to the Gulf Coast, New Orleans will always be more susceptible to failure of its flood protection system: in fact, the sophistication of Holland’s system, if transferred to New Orleans, would still only be good for protecting in the type of flood that occurs once every 500 years. Hurricanes are fundamentally more violent than anything Holland will ever likely suffer, and the technological advancements to protect New Orleans at the same degree as Amsterdam simply do not exist, or they are permanently outside of any municipal, state, or federal budget.

Skeptical lawyers may raise their hands again: “Nearly all of New Orleans’ street poles parallel the sidewalk and the street curb, so the wires essentially criss-cross the street, and poles obstruct the view of houses. Why couldn’t the utility companies have originally laid the wires behind the homes in the back alleys, as they often have done in the old residential neighborhoods of other cities?” It’s a valid criticism. Just look at the pictures below:



Observe how these Victorian shotguns must get their electric lifeblood right below the gutterline, at the location of those quintessentially ornate New Orleans brackets:


This configuration is hardly unique to New Orleans; plenty of other old neighborhoods in American cities have utility poles in the front yards of the residents. But in many cases in New Orleans, the poles only line one side of the street, and homes on the other side receive their juice through a bundle of wires that leapfrog across the lanes, or radiate outward from a single pole that serves as a vertex for distributing the current.

That’s a lot of wires. Compare this to a city like Chicago, where many older neighborhoods still employ overhead wires, but they are carefully tucked behind the homes in the back alleys and are virtually inconspicuous when walking or driving along a local street. Take the 3300 Block of North Hoyne Avenue, in the Roscoe Village neighborhood of Chicago. A photographed street section looks like the image below, taken from Google Streetview:

Compared to a typical New Orleans residential street, this block in Chicago is bereft of overhead lines. But they have not been buried. Look slightly above and behind the homes on the left side of the street. The secret to Chicago’s comparatively inconspicuous overhead electrical grid is that it falls behind the homes, parallel to the back alleys. The back side of 3300 North Hoyne is visible below:

The wires radiate to each of the residential units from the central artery of cables hoisted by wooden poles, but their location in the back alley makes them barely conspicuous from the street out front—presumably the side in which most people would prefer showcasing their homes. No electrical poles blocking the façades either.

Chicago’s placement of the poles on nearly all of its streets is orderly, efficient, and subtle. But the city’s entire street network could claim two of those three adjectives as well. The relentless grid is orderly, efficient, and anything but subtle, as it is patently obvious to even the most uninformed viewer when flying overhead. Here is the network for Roscoe Village and its environs:

Chicago blocks are fundamentally rectangular based, or—one could argue—bisected squares. Homes front the long side of each quadrilateral, while the entrances to the alleys fit within the short side. Thus the alleys on the 3300 block of North Hoyne—and the power lines—fit into the block structure like this, as indicated by the red markings:

This grid replicates itself across the entire city, with few deviations—it is essentially an extension of the range and township line system originally platted from the Land Ordinance of 1785. Zoom out just a bit to see these bisected squares writ large.

While by some metrics, the grid is so repetitive that it makes navigation in Chicago more monotonous than it otherwise would be, it certainly makes it less difficult as well. It also facilitates the linearity of the overhead wire network in place in Roscoe Village and numerous other neighborhoods.

New Orleans by and large adheres to a grid network as well, but it is hardly as straightforward. One of the main reasons the city has earned the nickname “the Crescent City” is because of the concave bend in the Mississippi River which forms the basis for a continually reconfigured street network, visible in the map below:

Gridlike it may be, but virtually no one would claim it is an easier city for navigation than Chicago. The network routinely re-orders itself based on the serpentine path of the Mississippi River to the south. Arterials like Claiborne Avenue and St. Charles Avenue parallel the sinuous curves but still operate as the closest thing to a direct route: thus, an unacquainted visitor may think he or she is going straight along these streets—and most cross streets run perpendicular to them—but, if one watches these streets up to the horizon line, they follow a subtle arc. The result encompasses a series of grids that radiate outward from an unarticulated in triangular portions, like the folds of an Asian fan. For navigational purposes, it is virtually impossible to travel north or east as the crow flies, and it is equally difficult to provide directions using the conventional language: instead of “north”, locals will usually say “upriver” or “downriver”.

Zooming into a New Orleans grid makes it clear how different it is from Chicago.

The fundamental geometry is a square, not (as in Chicago’s case) a rectangle or a bisected square. The two long sides of a Chicago rectangle offer the front-door access to the homes and the two short sides provide access to the alleys, garages, and concealed overhead wires. New Orleans’ blocks lack the frontage hierarchy of Chicago; they are more egalitarian, and all four sides of the square typically provide access to homes. If I stare down the length of a block—any block—in New Orleans, this is what I see.


Very few curb cuts, and no alleys. With the exception of a few select blocks in the oldest neighborhoods—The French Quarter, Warehouse District, and Faubourg Marigny—New Orleans is comparatively lacking in rear access to property the way an alley-dominated city like Chicago is. A further zoom-in to the Uptown neighborhood more clearly reveals the configuration of parcels and property lines within each block, and it’s hard to spot any real pattern.

I can only begin to speculate exactly why New Orleans has such an irregular block system, but it largely echoes the anything-goes approach toward housing development that New Orleans has long adopted. As I walked along about eight blocks in this generally upper-middle class section of Uptown, I could witness a far greater diversity of housing types than one would expect in a similarly sized neighborhood in Chicago. As the two home photos above demonstrate, it’s interesting to see where homeowners decide to place their cars when they typically lack garages or carriage houses out back. Homes aren’t spaced as close together as they often are in Chicago, so some people squeeze a driveway to the side of the lot.


Others simply convert their modest front yards to parking spaces:

Still others preserve the fringe of greenery and settle for parking in the street.


My investigation as to why New Orleans lacks alleys has figuratively backed me into dead-end one—I can’t find any real answers. But I can guess. Unlike Chicago, in which large tracts were platted and developed with parcels of equal size and housing catering largely to a single economic group, New Orleans’ neighborhoods are a pastiche of irregular lot sizes, homes of widely variable scale and quality, and a seemingly arbitrary mix of uses. The result is—and has always been—that the wealthy and poor more frequently live cheek-by-jowl than in most other American cities. (It could also explain why New Orleans appears to be among the less broadly segregated cities in terms of housing and race.) Many wealthy old families from Uptown wanted their slaves (ahem—servants) to live in close proximity, if not on the premises. Instead of an alley and a garage, the back sides of many homes feature a smaller, semi-detached unit that once served slaves’ quarters. The resulting arrangement of parcels in blocks makes it nearly impossible to draw straight lines across parcel boundaries in New Orleans, and particularly hard to limn a dedicated utility easement behind the properties. The agency installing the poles and wires would have to zigzag out of different parcel lines in order to furnish an electric network in the back yards of people’s houses. Thus, the city’s leadership decided long ago to install virtually all of its electric poles in the only place where straight lines where relatively feasible—in the front, right along the sidewalk.

New Orleans faces a twofold dilemma, or four-fold, since all dilemmas have a duality to them. It would be wise to bury the cables to protect them from the strong winds of hurricanes, but then they’d be that much more vulnerable to inundation from floods. It would be lovely to conceal them in the alleys like Chicago does, but by and large it does not have alleys. The City most likely can never aspire to remove the overhead clutter in most of the old urban neighborhoods. How, then, can it come to terms with the mass of exposed infrastructure that comprises a typical street scene? The answer is simple: foster a culture around it that nullifies the idea that it is ugly, messy, or archaic. Celebrate it.

In the third and final section, I will focus on the most cost effective solutions for dealing with the visual pollution of infrastructure, using New Orleans as a model and revealing that it has far less of a hurdle to jump than it may initially seem.

Chicago keeps Carless Joe out of his own park.

Sometimes it’s impossible to determine the rationale of an urban infrastructure decision simply by looking at it, even though this blog has made it a habit of attempting to do so. I am totally at a loss for what might have prompted the City of Chicago to install this impediment at the intersection of Washington Street and Michigan Avenue:

This is, in fact, the first time I’ve seen this sort of pedestrian obstruction in the United States. I recall seeing it a few times in London to prevent jaywalking, but there, as in this country, it is usually a relic from an era in which cities were trying to prevent any external influence from disrupting the flow of traffic. By and large, the more pedestrian scaled cities are far more likely these days to introduce traffic calming devices that force motorists to recognize the presence of persons on foot. And they are removing these installations more often than they are retaining them. All these chained barricades do is protect cars from the nuisance of pedestrians intruding on their periphery. Is this really the goal of the City of Chicago, particularly when this crosswalk provides direct access to one of the city’s preeminent attractions in Millennium Park?

One might expect such a measure implemented in a more automobile oriented city such as Indianapolis, where fellow blogger Urban Indy recently recognized a streetscape plan that would shrink the sidewalk portion at intersections, thereby increasing the turning radii that will allow cars to zip into a right turn without having to reduce their speed significantly. But Indianapolis does not fence off its crosswalks. This picture, taken in September of 2009, did not appear to be a temporary installation, and I did not have the time to visually survey the intersection in full; maybe I could have deduced a justification for a crossing barrier here. Offhand, though, I cannot determine any reason why a city remotely interested in pedestrianism would have one of these, much as I would try to approach this from a balanced perspective. By closely scrutinizing, it even appears that there remains a bit of residual “scarring” from the old crosswalk lines.

Perhaps someone can enlighten me as to why Chicago would still have something like this? To me it is a testament to the fact that, perhaps even at a global level, we still have a long way to go before we have extirpated the frivolous pedestrian barriers to our urban infrastructure. And then we have an even greater hurdle to overcome when it comes to public works investments that harm pedestrians but accrue measurable benefits to cars; all too often the motorists still win without even having to flex any political muscle.

Answering the question posed by stairs to nowhere.

A few weeks ago I blogged about paved stairs in an old Indianapolis neighborhood, leading to vacant lots that serve as a reminder of the house that once stood there. Apparently Indianapolis isn’t the only city whose demolition crew decided its not worth the expense of ripping out the sidewalk when demolishing long-vacant housing.

Here is the evidence of a demolished home in the Logan Square neighborhood in Chicago, an area northwest of the Chicago Loop that has long been a working class Latino enclave. In the last decade, it has gentrified handily, due to its proximity to expensive, trendy neighborhoods such as Lakeview and Lincoln Park. And while never as devastated economically as neighborhoods further to the south, Logan Square certainly suffered a slump during Chicago’s economic nadir in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Compared to Indianapolis, this stairway to nowhere is relatively subtle. Chicago has even less topographic variety than Indianapolis (which at least enjoys a few hilly vantage points), so the elevation difference between the street and the properties that abut it only requires a single stair step. However, Chicago is far less subtle about proclaiming the lot’s vacant status.

Instead of the manicured lawns or unkempt verdure seen in Indianapolis vacant lots, this Chicago vacancy consists primarily of combed dirt with scrappy weeds growing patchily on barren soil and a tiny plot of an informal garden, collectively adorned by an ugly sign identifying the lot’s availability on the market. Perhaps this home was demolished only recently, though I see that as unlikely: a blighted home in this neighborhood would usually equate to a coveted fixer-upper to Chicago’s many urban professionals. What seems guaranteed is that it won’t be bought by a neighbor to turn into a side lot (as has happened in Indianapolis, New Orleans, and many other cities)—aside from a regulatory environment that supports continued high levels of housing density, the market would command too high of a price to let a parcel such as this simply lie fallow. Expect that, when favorable lending conditions return, this modest stairway will again lead to a house befitting the existing character of Logan Square.