Aging at home: does it have to be an uphill climb?

Baby Boomers remain the largest generation by volume of any recorded in the history of the United States.  This label, part of common parlance from coast to coast, imposes artificial bookends upon a group of people whose only real commonality is that they were conceived in the years following World War II—a spike in the birthrate that gives them gravitas, almost tautologically, again thanks to their formidable numbers.  They have shaped everything, particularly as they grew up and passed legal voting age, but then they continued to do so as they amassed wealth and earned a previously inconceivable purchasing power.  And their influence will undoubtedly continue in their wake after the last of them dies out.

Grim as it may be to talk about death, the first baby boomer became eligible for social security on October 15, 2007 (turning 62 on January 1, 2008), and, while a generation widely characterized by ambition and upward mobility is likely to defer retirement, eventually old age will catch up with it.   The widespread proliferation of extended care facilities, senior communities, and the younger “active adult” subdivisions is evidence that a sizable portion of the population is demanding a residential typology that scarcely existed 50 years ago, when most people were only expected to live a half dozen years after retirement.

But how do we respond to those who have no desire to leave the places they have called home for most of their adult lives?

A house like this, in the working class Detroit suburb of Lincoln Park, downriver from the Motor City, may at least shed a flicker of light on what’s happening.  And, as is often the case, I’m making assumptions with little more than my own peepers: I have no idea the age or family make-up of the folks who call this tidy bungalow home.  But the outside evidence suggests they are contending with the forces that father time imposes on our muscles, bones and joints.

The contraption leading to the front door should make it clear what I’m suggesting: it’s a wheelchair ramp.  And it’s an elaborate one.

More often than not, they have to be elaborate. Homes dating from this time period (between the 1920s and 1940s, I’d suspect) rarely accommodated people who depended on wheelchairs for mobility, partly due to lack of any organized advocacy on behalf of disabled people and heavily due to lack of demand.  Not only were people with access or functional needs less likely to expect navigability or self-sufficiency, the world simply had fewer of them around.  The life cycle simply didn’t mesh well with disabilities, and disabled people likely depended on either family or hired caretakers.  Times have changed, and homes with an extensive ramp like this one in Lincoln Park have grown increasingly common.

Aside from the physicality of the house itself, the space around it could pose a huge challenge.  Wheelchairs require a very gentle grade change of 1:12.  Otherwise, most users don’t have the strength to apply the needed torque to proceed up the slope, or their caretakers may be unable to push.  While motorized chairs can mitigate against topography to some extent, they are undoubtedly more expensive and may not be desirable for those who have enough upper-body capability to wheel themselves around.  Thus, to get the ramp they need to their front doors, many homeowners must sacrifice a good part of the front yard.

What’s interesting about the house in Lincoln Park is that it ostensibly has enough room, even though it rests on what would typically be a small parcel in a relatively dense, walkable pre-war neighborhood. While most of the homes in Lincoln Park claim narrow lots, this homeowner has ample space for a ramp on the one side.

But why would there be such a gap between homes, when the normal configuration for neighborhoods from this time period is much closer-knit, with minimal side yards?

It would appear that this modest little yellow house used to have a neighbor.  Just beyond the handicapped parking sign—to its left in the photo above—is a curb cut, with a paved strip wide enough for a car.  It’s hard to imagine any other purpose for that than a driveway that once led to a garage…to a garage that once served a house.  The house almost definitely was demolished, and enough of the pavement was removed to clear the ground for fresh turf.  All that remains is the strip between the sidewalk and the curb cut.

It’s neither possible nor reasonable to postulate that the owners of the yellow house bought the adjacent property, then demolished it, in part to expand their yard and to provide enough room for the handicapped ramp.  That former home could have befallen a million different fates.  But unlike Detroit, where demolished homes have routinely induced gaps in the streetscape, a lacuna such as this is rare in Lincoln Park.  And the generous side yard addresses what otherwise could have been a great enough engineering challenge to preclude this family’s ability to remain in their house.

Sweeping wheelchair ramps in front yards may not jump out to the unattuned eye—after all, we’ve seen the proliferation of accessible commercial and public buildings over the two decades since ADA passed—but it’s easy to surmise that their numbers are growing.    After all, those baby boomers may soon start facing the mobility impairments that accompany old age, and few houses, both old and new, meet the sundry requirements that allow households to age in place.  Aside from replacing all stairs with ramps, wheelchair friendly structures require significant additional retrofits.  Hinges must allow doors to pivot across a broader space in order to accommodate the gentler turn radii of wheelchairs.  Cabinets cannot be placed too high.  Knobs on stovetops—and the burners themselves—can’t be out of reach from a seated position.  Toilets need ample room and often bars for leverage to allow ingress and egress.  The operability of the most mundane household objects no longer seems so benign.   And I can’t begin to guess how the wheelchair-dependent person at this Lincoln Park house manages to get up to the next floor.   It may be little more than an attic or auxiliary space.  But if the bedroom’s up there, it’s probable that the family had to retrofit a room on the first floor to serve as the bedroom.  And since many older homes only have one bathroom, that spatial arrangement could also pose a huge problem if the loo is on what we Americans call floor two.

“Aging in place” may soon become a household term as this populated generation faces access and functional needs in an array of houses not built to accommodate them.  Americans with Disabilities Act standards are already ubiquitous, and HUD provided accessibility guidelines for affordable housing, coincident to the passage of ADA.  Could this cohort’s demand for ramps and broad bathrooms reach such an apex that it actually hurts the overall market for conventional housing?  Will the younger, less populous, able-bodied generation seek out a glut of homes entering the market?  Perhaps the boomers will resort to the tactics on display in these photos.

A colleague at a recent conference cogently observed that we rarely see sweeping ramps to front doors in high-income neighborhoods.  They dominate blue-collar areas.  A variety of cultural shifts over the next decade could corroborate if the aging in place phenomenon is socioeconomically driven, but it’s easy to speculate now whether such an assertion is true.  More affluent neighborhoods use their homeowners associations to create covenants attached to the deeds, which can restrict major modifications that could vitiate the aesthetics of the community.  These covenants may therefore require homeowners to find subtler and more expensive means of solving mobility problems.  Affluent homeowners may amortize their loans at a slightly earlier point in life, giving them more leverage in selling and moving to an appropriately suited domicile after retirement—one that better allows them to age in place than the one they enjoyed during their career years.  Lastly, affluent adults generally boast superior access to doctors and preventative care specialists, meaning they could be slightly less likely to face mobility impairments caused by common conditions such as stroke, since heart disease or cardiovascular-related ailments routinely affect lower-income people more often and at younger ages.

Regardless of how the baby boomers’ silver tsunami shapes future sociological studies, a fixed asset such as real estate will have to adapt to our morphing, creaky bodies.  The development world’s response to an as-of-yet undetermined demand shift could exert a profound impact on the shape and appearance of residential communities.  And we won’t always be able to bulldoze the home next door to make way for a new entrance.

Forbidden feet.

Travel any reasonable distance in this country, across multiple political boundaries, and you will inevitably discover a variety practices in handling traffic.  We see it everywhere: speed limit differences, right turns on red (or not), the size and generosity of the turn radius at an intersection, the style and design (or even the very existence) of pedestrian amenities. Though it may be a bit hyperbolic to assert that these idiosyncratic distinctions arise from the constituents applying representative democracy to get the system they desire (within the bounds of federally mandated core standards, that is), it isn’t far from the truth either.  Some states have developed their own characteristic strategies: the Michigan Left that I wrote about a few months ago has earned its significant detractors, but enough traffic engineers recognize its merits that other states have started adopting it.  (They still call it a Michigan Left.)  And everyone on the East Coast knows New Jersey’s penchant for the jughandle style of “left” turns, which also has apparently generated enough backlash to prompt injunctive legislation.

But one state has managed to surprise me with its dogged tendency to feature a particular sign—something I have only seen on extremely rare occasions elsewhere, but in this state the sign is commonplace.

Even amidst the dusky, grainy quality of the photo, it is obvious what this sign is trying to convey: no pedestrians allowed here.  Granted, it’s not an area that most would consider a pedestrian paradise: a post-war suburb to a large metropolitan area, in which big-box chains, strip malls, and sizable parking lots flank both sides of a six-lane highway.  Again, the twilight haze might obscure the clarity of the photo, but not enough to point out the obvious.

These signs are not along a limit access highway, an environment that disallows pedestrians through the vast majority of the country.  No, this is an area with plenty of stop lights, curb cuts, and choke points for vehicular traffic.  It’s not an attractive, desirable, or particularly safe area for walkers, but must they be forbidden?  Is it perhaps an isolated instance—a particularly hazardous location in which the sign emerges out of a genuine public interest to inhibit those without motors?

No, these signs are everywhere.  Here’s another intersection a half mile down the road.

Granted, it’s probably a horrible intersection to traverse by foot.  But to forbid it altogether?  Where is this?!  The lighter sky helps clarify, while the concrete “Jersey barrier” separating the directions of traffic flow might offer a hint as to what state this is.  But no, this isn’t New Jersey.

It’s a larger and even more populous state: the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.  I’m not as well-traveled as some people out there, particularly when it comes to the western half of the US, but I have still never seen a state where “no pedestrian” signs are as prolific.  I frankly can’t recall seeing them anywhere in most states except along expressways.  But they’re just a part of the roadside landscape in PA—in exurbs, rural areas, or major suburban thoroughfares like this one.

I’d be shocked if local police enforce this regulation outside of places where pedestrians typically are forbidden—i.e., legitimate limited access highways.  While it is unfair to form flattering or degrading inferences about an entire state from something as petty as a roadside sign, it’s hard not to wonder what elicited this sign in a state like Pennsylvania, where the settlements, the housing stock, and the roads largely existed before the automobile.  To this day, most Pennsylvania cities and towns—particularly those in the eastern half of the state, where this photo comes from—stand upon a tightly wrought grid with narrow streets, tiny parcels, small setbacks from the sidewalks and an overwhelmingly walkable character.  The interstices between towns might be filled with conventional suburbanization, but the old towns remain quite compact.  This pattern contrasts sharply with a state such as Nevada, where virtually all inhabited areas owe their layout to the ubiquity of the car.  Since around 1970, Pennsylvania has also remained one of the slowest-growing states in the country; population growth in the 2000s was less than 5%.  Thus, Pennsylvania can claim many more intact pre-automobile communities than most states.  And its largest cities, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, have public transportation systems that, at least by American standards, are fairly robust.

The Keystone State should boast better-than-average pedestrianism, and—for the most part—it probably does.  But somehow, among its successive legislatures, this red, white and black sign slipped into the inventory for various municipal traffic engineers, and in quite a few places they have deployed it with abandon.  My hope for those Pennsylvanians who lack the option or ability to drive is that all police offers turn a blind eye to this regulation.  While the photos above don’t depict a particularly walkable environment (sidewalks are sparse), how is anyone supposed to respond to a scene like this?

The municipality’s public works department has paved along the sidewalk easement, but then it restricts people from walking through the installation of this sign.  It might not yet be dusk, but it’s close enough to the twilight zone.

Separate the ersatz and collect up all the cream.

While the interplay between the built and natural environments occupies the bulk of my ruminations, every now and then I can’t help but indulge myself.  And I step fully into the world of pure imagination.  The aisles of a Meijer discount hypermarket store might not be exactly what Roald Dahl had in mind through his chocolate factory (or Leslie Bricusse), but it’s just about as fabricated as a movie set... 

…and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  For those who live in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois or Kentucky, Meijer is as much a part of the shopping landscape as Walmart.  It’s a fierce competitor in these five states, and I have no doubt it continues to frustrate the executives in Bentonville, Arkansas—my suspicion is that Walmart’s market share in this part of the country is lower than it otherwise would be, thanks to this modest chain that germinated just outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan exactly 80 years ago, making it nearly 30 years older than the world’s largest retailer.  But how did Meijer remain confidently ensconced in its Midwestern niche when Walmart dethroned so many others?  (Ames, Pharmor, and Venture went the way of passenger pigeon well over a decade ago, even if some telltale labelscars remain.)

I could expound on how Meijer has effectively cramped Walmart’s style for a few decades now, all while refusing ever to go public.  It avoids far-flung locations like its home state’s Upper Peninsula, no doubt saving it a fortune in logistical costs.  It expands its territory slowly, preferring to densify within its five signature states for the time being; rumors of an inaugural location in Wisconsin have yet to materialize.  It has attempted to broaden its scope through standalone discount department stores (without the groceries), pharmacies, warehouse clubs (like Sam’s Club), and specialty clothing.  None of these concepts proved fruitful, so the home office closed them within a few years.  Yet it continues to flourish in that cluster of great lakes states (and Kentucky).  Last year, Meijer opted to open a store in the Detroit city limits, seen in the photo above--a breakthrough of sorts, since many other major retailers (including the goliath from Arkansas) have shunned the Motor City.  These conservative strategies may have helped Meijer survive the competition that Walmart decimated, but I’d like to think another tactic has helped give the regional chain its edge.

Virtually every Meijer that I’ve seen has an entire row in its well-maintained grocery devoted to ethnic foods.  The specific location often dictates exactly what options it sells, but regardless of the offerings, most evidence suggests that the company has done its research.  Rarely will you see Walmart accommodate an ethnic group (such as Amish buggy parking in Northern Indiana). But online forums like British Expats routinely refer to Meijer—not Walmart—as the go-to for hard-to-find European goodies, and most locations have at least a small but well-stocked British shelves, including the one in the Detroit suburb of Allen Park featured above.  This particular location, with a trade area that includes sizable Mexican, Polish, and Arab populations, not surprisingly offers generous Latino, Eastern European and Middle Eastern sections.  It also distinguishes the Indian subcontinent from the rest of Asia.

But what really caught my attention was the adjective before these regional references.

We see “authentic Italian” followed by “pasta”.  Does this imply that the pasta section, for whatever reason, is otherwise inauthentic?  Or is it pasta from other countries?  Meijer also splits hairs on the other side of the aisle, providing its customers with “authentic Mexican”—

and “Mexican” without the authenticity.

Tex-Mex.  Or American Mexican.  A taqueria versus Taco Bell.  Various studies have shown three ethnic cuisines in the United States consistently vie for the title of most popular—and, not surprisingly, the most ubiquitous.  While the US has more Chinese restaurants than McDonald’s, Italian cuisine has long rated most highly.  But the surge of Mexicans and the cultural influence have elicited a concomitant increase in the popularity of cuisine from south of the border.  Virtually all ethnicities, however, can claim a rise in the popularity of their cuisines.  Thirty years ago, Thai and Indian restaurants were relatively rare outside of the biggest metro areas; now they are fairly easy to find in a small city of 50,000.

The inevitable result of this?  We see more Americanized knock-offs, as well as Meijer’s need to distinguish between the “authentic” (often imported) and the bastardized.  No doubt in another decade, with the ascendancy of falafel, hummus, and shawarma, Middle Eastern cuisine will approach mainstream status, just as it already has in Metro Detroit, home of one of the largest Arab populations outside of ethnically Arab countries.  We already have hummus flavors that would constitute blasphemy in many parts of the world, adulterated to meet mainstream American tastes.  The “authentic” partition in the grocery aisle will soon envelop new nations, impelling greater need to distinguish idiosyncratic, ethnically precise merchandise from its vanilla counterparts…and another opportunity for Meijer to capitalize on something it already does well.

Retrograde retail: there’s weakness in numbers.

Some businesses just fail to quit, though it’s not necessarily from lack of trying.

And if all the negatives in that sentence dilute the denotation, that might be the whole point…at least when the businesses in question are former retail leviathans like Kmart and Sears.

I’ve written about both chains many times in the past on this blog, but little to nothing since 2010 or so.  Truthfully, neither has changed much.  The two brand names, formerly separate companies but merged since 2005, continue to hobble along, shedding a few of the most underperforming stores each quarter, while even the ones that linger still leave onlookers scratching their heads.  How do these retailers—now essentially one company called Sears Holdings Corporation—manage to stay in business?

To a certain extent, they employ the Star Trek mantra: going where no man has gone before…or, to be frank, where no one else is willing to go anymore.  So they aren’t exactly doing it boldly.  Kmart’s approach (which I blogged about four years ago) frequently involves lingering in early automobile-oriented suburban areas that peaked in the late 1950s—the point in time when Kmart was still a juggernaut for discount shopping.  However, these aging suburbs, which typically offered the coveted homeownership ideal to an emergent middle class within a car-dependent milieu, are no longer so savory.  Check out the surviving few Kmarts in Indianapolis, from the blog post above.  Generally speaking, these areas have declined enough economically that the robust Walmart won’t touch them.  In Kansas City, the formerly thriving Bannister Mall area began to tank in the 1990s; today, it represents one of the largest expanses of blighted suburban retail I have ever seen anywhere, featured in this prominent post.  But, as of the fall of 2012, the Kmart at Bannister survives…pretty much the only well-known sign amid the retail wreckage.  (Well, that and the notorious Burlington Coat Factory, but that’s another story.)

Then there’s Sears, whose brand image isn’t quite as weak these days as Kmart, mainly because it still clings to its aggressively middlebrow origins, a contrast from the always low-budget offerings at Kmart.  (Though Kmart has managed the more effective viral commercials in recent years.)  The department store remains a staple at most middle-class malls.  But enclosed shopping malls ain’t what they used to be, for the most part, and if a mall is starting to show weakness in the form of diminishing occupancy levels, it’s often safe to guess which area will get hit the hardest.  That’s right—the Sears wing.  I blogged about it awhile ago, at the primarily successful Castleton Square Mall in Indianapolis, where vacancy was low throughout this super-regional shopping hub…except for the hallway leading to the Sears.

Meanwhile, Cortana Mall in Baton Rouge took the ailing Sears corridor to a whole new level.  My first trip to Cortana in December 2005 confronted me generally busy shopping center, even though locals had longed viewed Cortana as the “other mall” in Baton Rouge, at least since Mall of Louisiana opened in 1997 in a more affluent part of town.  In 2005, most of Cortana flourished (perhaps due to the holidays), except for the hallway leading to Sears, which was overwhelmingly populated with local, mom-and-pop tenants…the type that pervade a struggling mall.  Jump ahead to April 2010—the time of my blog article—and Cortana was peppered with vacancies throughout the structure, while the Sears corridor was dead as a doornail.  Pretty much no inline tenants left, except for Sears.  Even in the most vibrant of malls, the Sears wing tends to host the highest concentration of off-name retailers, clearly suggesting that 1) national brand names don’t want to lease space close to Sears, and 2) mall management, desperate to maintain good occupancy rates, must lower the cost of leasing space, consequently attracting retailers who cannot afford the higher costs in the corridors leading to Macy’s or Dillard’s.  Thus, Sears gets the off brands…when it’s lucky.

A recent trip to suburban Detroit revealed another example of an anemic shopping hub anchored by Sears, but this time within a different typology.

 

Sure, it doesn’t really look that different from your typical Sears in a mega-mall.

But it’s a freestanding Sears—formerly a mainstay of American retail but now relatively uncommon.  It is untethered to any larger mall; no other department stores are nearby.  While the standalone Sears might still occasionally splay out along the highway in the purlieus of a small city (under 25,000 people, for example) the one in the photos below is anything but rural.  It’s in Lincoln Park, a blue-collar inner-ring suburb belonging to Detroit’s “Downriver” communities, which is the local term for the extensive concatenation of municipalities that band along the Detroit River as it eventually distends into Lake Erie.  A fully built-out suburb that exploded after World War II, Lincoln Park is also surrounded in almost all directions by other tightly packed suburbs from more or less the same time period.

Freestanding Sears operations made sense in large towns or small cities surrounded by farmland, since those settlements didn’t necessarily have the trade area to support a regional mall.  But Lincoln Park can claim hundreds of thousands of people within a 10-mile radius.  Perhaps, because of this, one could speculate that this particular Sears serves as a more effective anchor than others: not only does it serve a huge trade area, but it isn’t competing with other, more robust department stores like Macy’s.

Such a guess would be wrong.

This is the remaining strip mall attached to the Lincoln Park Sears.  In the first photo, the edge of the Sears portion is partly visible on the far left.

It’s almost completely vacant, with the exception of a Dollar Tree and an outparcel Big Boy restaurant.

Predictably, a shopping plaza such vacancy levels won’t shell out the cost for basic common area maintenance; drivers have to proceed with caution to avoid huge potholes or neglected debris.

Does Sears Holding Company, parent of Sears and Kmart, know something the rest of us don’t?  Both chains are born from major Midwestern urban centers—Sears from the Chicago area, and Kmart from metro Detroit (in Troy, MI, just 25 miles northeast of Lincoln Park) but customers in their home states aren’t showing any greater loyalty to their brands than they are anywhere else.  The business expansion practices that impelled these brands to stretch from coast to coast may very well be doing them in; most Midwesterners don’t even know the brands came from their part of the country.  Compare this to southern department stores Dillard’s and Belk, which are still mainstays south of the Mason-Dixon and have ever so slightly begun to expand, though never to the ubiquity of the two former titans above.

I will be amazed if this Lincoln Park Sears is still operating two years from now.  Beyond that, I see only two other plausible courses of action: the company sheds virtually all of its locations outside the Midwest and concentrates its energy by reinvigorating loyalty in its region of origin (which happens a lot with restaurant chains); or, it folds altogether as a brick-and-mortar entity and becomes an online wraith, akin to the formerly pre-eminent but now essentially defunct Montgomery Wards (as Wards.com) and Service Merchandise.  It’s not exactly boldly going anywhere, but the cybermarket offers the best chance scoping fertile pastures when finicky customers reject all but the choicest grapes on the vineyard.

A chip off the old bulb.

Seven months after the announcement, it still seems like the largest municipal bankruptcy filing (at least up to this point) is the stuff of legend—the culminating event, after successive blunders.  The apex.  Or the nadir.  No doubt those of us living here are guilty of a degree of chauvinism as we experience how it plays out firsthand, but it’s easy for anyone with even moderate media curiosity to see how much the city has hogged the headlines.  It may be for all the wrong reasons, but Detroit is prominent once again.

Yet it was only weeks—if not days—after the declaration made international news that, in order to convey to the world the magnitude of the city’s financial woes, journalists honed in on more mundane failures—failures that, by virtue of their banality, were all the more shocking.  Locals have known about them for ages.  A portfolio of abandoned public school real estate larger than many cities’ functional school systems.  An absence of snowplows, even after heavy storms.  A stonewall of silenced civil servants, hogtied from effectively carrying out duties by daily uncertainty about the security of those same jobs.  The virtual absence of any emergency response, resulting in two-hour waits for an ambulance or a police call.

But the one that crowds out the rest, no doubt at least partially due to its ubiquity and ordinariness, is the persistent non-functionality of those streetlights.  One of the editorialists for the Free Press has branded it “the city’s deepest embarrassment”.  By most estimates, up to 40% are out on any given night.  Anyone passing through can tell when crossing into the city limits for this exact reason: even huge stretches of the interstates are black, although they’re state or federal highways.  It’s hard to determine if these shadowy streets originate from a cash-strapped DPW’s inability to replace the bulbs—which obviously require periodic maintenance—or an oversight that far precedes the checkered Kilpatrick administration, when the city’s fiscal woes first garnered national attention.  All it takes is a trip down Mack Avenue on the city’s east side to postulate that the problem is a half-century in the making.

Silhouettes of streetlights punctuate the dusky penumbra, but even at a distance, the shape of these lights seems odd.  Antiquated?  Probably.  And a closer view confirms it.

To be frank, I can’t recall seeing lights like this before anywhere else in the country, and I’m well-traveled across some of the more economically deprived pockets.  From the baroque iron filigree work of the stanchion to the acorn shape of the light itself, my guess is this streetlight comes from an inventory that most cities had fully retired over three decades ago.  And there’s probably good reason for that: this one is broken.

And so is another one half a block away.

About half of the lights along this stretch of Mack use this design, and most are cracked.  A big distended bulb offers more surface area encased in glass—more space for something to wrong.  Whether hit by flying debris hit or (my suspicion) deliberately smashed by a passer-by, this streetlight is almost definitely non-operational.  And the visible hardware is only half the problem: inside that quaint, clunky bulb (your grandmother’s streetlight) is—or was—a mercury vapor lamp. Detroit is one of the few cities that still depends heavily on this less efficient, increasingly obsolete method of illumination; most other large cities have replaced their inventory with superior metal halide lamps.   USA Today also noted that Detroit and Milwaukee share the dubious distinction of being the only large cities that still deploy series circuits for much of the streetlight network, meaning that if one transformer box breaks down, the whole strip of lights goes dark, like an old string of Christmas tree lights.  While the Mack Avenue streetlight featured above remains attached to a wood, other lights in the city append to metal poles, presumably the same age as the lights themselves, characterized by rust, peeling paint, and sometimes even open cavities at the base.  The whole contraption has seen better days.

But viewing these cracked eggs through a cultural lens can help temper some of the scorn.  They might not work well as modern lamps and they’re much easier to vandalize, but they’re relics—they’re curiosity items.  And they’re particularly eye-catching along Mack Avenue because there are so many of them, yet they’re still interspersed with more contemporary designs.  This cool pic doesn’t win awards for clarity, but it still shows the juxtaposition of old and new streetlights, through their silhouettes.

Or on opposite sides of the street.

And on a depopulated residential street not so far from Mack, a different kind of lighting style emerges—perhaps not as old-fashioned but still an oddity.

Perhaps a style and technology that never caught on?

The irony of the 1950s-era (or maybe even 1940s) lighting that lingers on in Detroit is that, in a broader spatial context, it exemplifies technological advancements playfully defying shifts in taste culture for a particular design.  On Mack Avenue, ancient streetlights bespeak a broke, ineffective government.  And yet, elsewhere in the metro, they convey something else.

Forgiving the quality of the photo, it’s still easy to see a similar style of lighting to the ones on Mack Avenue, but this time they’re impeccable.

But this is the comfy suburb of Livonia, presumably part of a streetscape improvement along a thoroughly auto-oriented corridor of strip malls and big boxes.  And they no doubt were a deliberate choice from the Public Works Department because they look good—providing a vintage, old-timey feel.  Apparently they don’t worry in Livonia about ne’er-do-well pedestrians throwing rocks at these distended bulbs.  Maybe it’s because Livonia has few ne’er-do-wells….and even fewer pedestrians.  But even some of the economically healthier neighborhoods within Detroit have caught the bug, replacing older streetlights with a newly vintage design, like these twin lamps in Midtown, near Woodward Avenue:

This inversion of taste cultures pervades streetscapes across the country, where everything old is new again, in order to exploit nostalgia among a generation that never really experienced a normative walkable environment—a landscape that was still the standard during the era when city crew first installed those acorn mercury vapor lamps.  We’re seduced by nostalgia and novelty; a hybrid of the two is doubly sweet.  Just go to the French Quarter in New Orleans, where a city equally negligent in modernizing its utilities now capitalizes on this same inertia—the flickery gas lanterns that once were a backwater embarrassment are now ambiance.  Detroit isn’t yet so lucky to take similar advantage of its obsolete lighting (and the fact that most streets like Mack are a hodgepodge of styles doesn’t help), but that doesn’t mean that an emergent cultural voice won’t someday call those lights “genuine retro”, and the preached-upon choir will be listening.

The periodic “freshening” of basic urban infrastructure is only partly due to necessity, as it may very well be in Detroit.  But a great deal simply has to do with keeping up with the joneses, resulting in often needlessly costly capital investments.  For example, the standard for pedestrian signals at intersections now typically involves a “countdown” timer, telling pedestrians exactly how many seconds they have left to cross.  While useful, are these timer boxes essential?  Regardless, public works departments are rapidly phasing out the single-box approach for these new timer-boxes, with little evidence of public advocacy one way or another (despite the fact that the public inevitably is paying for most of these replacement costs).  From decorative viaducts to Day-Glo yellow road caution signs, jurisdictions hell-bent on an infrastructural one-upmanship should look to Detroit as an inverse exemplar—what might happen when profligacy goes perpetually unchecked.  Unless, of course, these granny-and-gramps streetlights become hip and cool again, in which case the Motor City might have the last laugh.

A time of the signs.

It should go without saying that a clear indicator of an effective sign is its ability to communicate its intended message.  Whether the sign’s intent is to advertise, to inform, or to admonish, it loses most of its power if its capacity to denote doesn’t come easily or quickly (and quickly nearly always translates to easily).  This condition may be true in most milieus, but it’s particularly relevant among roadside signage.  After all, at least in the US, most people approach roadways from the perspective of a motorized vehicle, meaning they are moving across the landscape quickly enough that small objects pass by with little time to absorb them.  So those signs have to be clear…otherwise how can they get their point across?

At a fundamental level, there’s nothing wrong with this unusual sign in Southfield, MI, a large, busy suburb of Detroit with definitive Edge City characteristics.

Although signs restricting motorists from turning during certain hours are hardly commonplace, they certainly aren’t unheard of.  Obviously, a succession of cars waiting to make a left turn at a busy intersection can create a logjam, deteriorating the Level of Service of any busy arterial, especially during peak travel times.  But look at the hours listed on this particular sign.

Contrary to our expectations, this isn’t a morning restriction.  Left turns are off limits here from 6:00a all the way until midnight—a whopping 18 hours.  Only in the middle of the night (or early morning), from 12:01a to 5:59a, are vehicles permitted to turn on red.

It probably makes sense: the traffic volume here on Telegraph Road, just south of W. Twelve Mile Road, is so intense that cars seeking to turn left probably should have to wait, at least through most of the day.  But how likely is it that the human eye and brain will interpret this correctly the first time around, even when stopped at the light?  After all, both the beginning and ending restriction times are AM.  Most signs advertising use restrictions only regulate for brief intervals; not three-quarters of the day. Even if a driver stops here for quite some time, the brain is likely to require time to process the fact that this restriction completely encompasses the PM hours. And for those who pass by quickly, then plunge ahead, will they necessarily interpret the information on this sign accurately?  This sign’s unconventional regulation could make it an easy locus for law enforcement to “catch” motorists in a moving violation. (“But officer, I thought the sign said…”)

Truth is, this restriction is nothing more than a refinement of a Michigan left, a fairly common traffic management practice throughout urban areas in the Wolverine State—but pretty rare just about everywhere else.  This tactic, in which a motorist makes a right and then a carefully controlled U-turn (often regulated by stop lights as in the Southfield example above), no doubt reduces chances of gridlock induced by a left-turn lane, albeit by diverting vehicles across a more convoluted path.  Michigan’s famously broad thoroughfares, coupled with generous medians, make the Michigan left superlative at mitigating against the hazard of motorists demurringly seeking a left turn across a broad intersection.  But for the unfamiliar (i.e., the non-Michiganders) the approach confuses and annoys, because it seems so counter-intuitive.  And a road sign with bizarre restrictions only amplifies this confusion.

In MDOT’s defense, the Michigan left is catching on: Indiana installed one at a busy intersection a few years ago (at the border of Indianapolis and the suburb Fishers), and southwestern DOTs have begun adopting them.  Meanwhile, my former home of New Orleans is perhaps even more enamored with wide medians than Detroit (though they call them “neutral grounds” down there), and the city has long embraced a variant on Michigan, in that motorists usually must make a U-turn at a later point just beyond the intersection, rather than an immediate left turn at the convergence of the two streets.  But the approach involves much more elaborate signage with the Michigan left in metro Detroit, akin to this graphic.

Will the creeping dissemination of the Michigan left across other parts of the country eventually make the “6am to 12am” time frame easier to interpret?  Probably not, unless signage featuring this interval becomes commonplace.  And why should it?  Wouldn’t it have been more straightforward simply to say “left turns allowed – 12am to 6am only”?  Or to depict the interval through military time?  But would American civilians ever catch on to the 24-hour approach, common throughout most of the world?  Yeah, that’s about as likely as switching to the metric system—or surrendering our sovereignty to France.  Which pretty much amount to the same thing.