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.

Modulars get modern.

Work commitments yet again prevent me from devoting time to lengthy blog posts the way I often would like, but maybe this is a godsend for my readers. My previous post on condo(m)s in Dayton managed to arouse more interest than I’ve achieved in some time. One topic from which I have shied for the most part—probably more than necessary—is the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Having lived in New Orleans at the time of the storm and a few years after, I have hundreds of personal photos, as well as more provided by some of my enthusiastic readers, which I included in a recent post featuring the Mississippi Coast. Considering the wealth of opportunity I have for featuring the Gulf Coast photographically, it’s time I explore what I know in depth while remaining sensitive to the swirl of emotions that surround this as-of-yet unsurpassed fiasco (at least in the US). And if I don’t have time to be as sensitive and nuanced as I would like, at least I can be brief.

For the vast majority of the US, the words “FEMA Trailer” conjure an image largely supplied through the extensive media coverage in the early years after the storm: a non-descript white RV that can easily hitch itself to a large vehicle. For the million or two in the Gulf Coast sitting directly within Hurricane Katrina’s path, a FEMA Trailer was just a part of daily life. They were everywhere. In metro New Orleans, you would have been hard pressed to find a street block without at least one perched in the driveway or front yard. Only a shut-in could claim not to see a trailer on a daily basis; a huge portion of the population lived in them, sometimes for years.

Many individuals suffered losses too catastrophic to justify simply “camping out” in their front yards as they repaired their homes. They had to move into “FEMA Villages”—essentially makeshift mobile home parks. These structures were a fair amount larger and less movable than a trailer. Though funded by the government (either leasing the land—or the trailer pads—from a private vendor, or buying it and installing all the infrastructure), the goal was always for these settlements to transition back to private operation, coincident with their residents rebuilding their homes or by moving permanently into these federal villages.

But both the Villages and the Trailers have had their ardent detractors. To many, they were ugly, soulless settlements, more poorly thought-out than New Orleans’ public housing (an achievement in itself) and distributed through an inefficient process. FEMA/Homeland Security built many Villages out of expediency, in places where the land was cheap or readily available, rather than being convenient as a temporary settlement for evacuees. Some of the trailers got lost in bureaucracy and sat languishing in fields in Arkansas, long enough that they could deteriorate. Other naysayers saw FEMA’s Individual Assistance process as a pseudo-solution that fostered long-term government dependency and opportunities for fraud. These critics noted the absence of clearly articulated plans for relocation or eviction after a deadline that the feds pushed back time and time again. The trailers, in turn, were often so flimsy that they’d succumb to the next major storm, resulting in further squandering of public dollars. And individuals on both sides of the political spectrum criticized the sudden public health/public relations debacle two years after the storm, when studies revealed that the levels of formaldehyde were enough to trigger serious and often dangerous respiratory allergic reactions.

Accompanying this pound of cure, however, was an ex-post-facto ounce of prevention. The seemingly sloppily administered government aid after Katrina elicited a variety of smaller, frequently for-profit initiatives attempting to rectify some of the problems posed by FEMA housing peppered liberally across the Gulf Coast by offering alternatives. Various companies attempted to tame Americans’ general aversion toward concrete as a primary construction material in housing, touting its resiliency and low cost of maintenance. Private consultants devised ways to engineer FEMA villages under neo-traditionalist principles so that the infrastructure installed could support desirable long-term mixed use developments vaguely akin to the much ballyhooed resort community of Seaside, Florida (popularized through the movie The Truman Show), after the trailers and mobile homes moved out. Neither of these proposals took off—in fact, they left such a meager ripple that most internet search engines would yield nothing. Slightly more successful—and a non-profit venture—were the aesthetic alternatives to FEMA trailers known as Katrina Cottages: cheery, affordable little structures built much more durably than typical mobile homes, intended to withstand strong winds, offer highly efficient storage as an antidote to small square footage (usually under 700), and in keeping with the architectural vernacular of New Orleans’ pastel single shotgun homes. One city in particular, Ocean Springs, Mississippi, pioneered the Katrina Cottage community by leasing a few acres adjacent to downtown to host a small cluster of these much heralded residential alternatives.

The Katrina Cottage was a drop in the bucket amidst the flood of federal housing assistance (an ill chosen pun, I know). It could hardly compete as anything more than a niche market when it had only a fraction of working capital of such juggernauts as FEMA and HUD. But Ocean Springs also hosts the innovative, privately initiated solution I saw last summer, five years after the storm, when most other affluent homeowners along the Gulf had either fully rebuilt or thrown in the towel completely. But this home just blocks away from the Mississippi coast was still undergoing repairs.

The glare from my car’s windshield doesn’t help things, but the configuration is the same one you might have seen on the Gulf Coast just two or three years earlier: a mobile home poised in the middle of the front yard, with the permanent home partially hidden behind it. Approaching it from the other direction better reveals the relationship between the two structures:

This home is close enough to the water that it clearly could be influenced by violent storm surge; it might even be vulnerable to an uncommonly strong tidal surge. The elevation of the foundation is probably nothing new—most houses nearby have been raised—but the length of the supportive piers is probably greater than before. The first of the two photos reveals that the garage was a conventional one, which, it would appear, the unusual elevation has now rendered useless as a carport. But the most notable feature here is that modular unit out front. By most judgments, it looks a far lot comfier, sturdier, and more attractive than a FEMA trailer. Could the homeowners have been inspired by what they saw elsewhere in Ocean Springs, through the winsome Katrina Cottages less than a mile away? I can’t help but think so. It’s highly likely the improvements to the main house no longer have anything to do with disaster recovery. After all, Katrina struck five years prior, and the deadline for Individual Assistance applications has long since expired. Still, the owner may have liked the approach of living off his or her infrastructure on personal property while making significant changes to the home. Those homeowners with the wherewithal for something nicer are likely to seek an upgrade from the spartan, formaldehyde-laced FEMA trailers. The result is a structure like this: still highly efficient but much easier on the eye, and probably more durable too. And it is likely far more movable than the average modular home.

The clichéd crisis/opportunity dichotomy can’t help but ring true. Not only does it take a cataclysmic event to shake the populace out of complacency (which is precisely what we had become in our relation to hurricane evacuation and general emergency preparedness prior to Katrina), but it takes further muddling through the solution to discover that a mitigating approach would have borne more utilitarian fruit in the long run. Although the median home size has shrunk over the past few years (for the first time in recorded US history), we aren’t yet exactly considering the Katrina Cottage, much less the modular home, as the typical piece of the American Dream. But we are coming closer to parity than ever seemed possible before the bubble burst. Average household sizes have been shrinking for decades: since more people live alone, it is probable that they will, at least in aggregate, demand less space. The Katrina Cottage or the smartly accoutered FEMA trailer may someday seem less like an idiosyncrasy and more like a brilliant act of foresight—a widely cheered solution within a persistently dour housing market.

One commodity still selling well after the real estate bubble burst.

In this extended period of blogging dearth, it occurred to me that I’m long overdue for a certain type of article that I haven’t featured in awhile: the mini-post, or the snapshot. Time shortages during a busy period within our squadron make this seem like an opportune time for a quick read. Most of the time these easily digestible nuggets involve some signage that I found odd or amusing, and this one is no exception, taken over a year ago from the gentrifying urban neighborhood known as the Portland District in Dayton, Ohio:

We’re never too old for puerile humor, and it doesn’t require an eagle eye to figure out the way this sign provides an opportunity for a dirty pun-like transformation. The smudge between the O and the S on the second word suggests that some pranksters already attempted it, and the property owner addressed the indelicate phrase with white paint. But why leave so much space between these last two letters? It’s almost as though the creator of the sign was inviting someone to add the obligatory letter M at the end. A closer look reveals where the fault lies:


The portion of the white paint smudge that blocks the “valley” of the M ultimately conceals the sign’s original fallacy: an apostrophe. Years of English classes never taught me the appropriate name for this mechanics faux pas; only recently did I learn that the mistaken introduction of an apostrophe when a plural is indicated is called a greengrocer’s apostrophe. Wiktionary explains that t generally derives from ignorance of the use of an apostrophe, and in an urban environment with a high density of signs, one can rarely go a day without seeing it.

This use of a greengrocer’s apostrophe in Dayton only expanded the opportunity to transform the sign into the word teenagers think of when hear “condominium” or “condo”—it wouldn’t have been as easy to squeeze an M in there if the existing goof weren’t there and the proper space existed between the letters. Thus, an expensive sign has suffered a twofold desecration: first from the elementary mechanics error, and secondly from the vulgar vandal. Let it be a lesson for us all that not every word that ends in S needs an apostrophe before it. In fact, most don't!

And Buckeyes, I promise to portray Dayton in a more sophisticated light in the future.

Dressing the wounds with paint.

My suspicion is that the majority of the readers here have at least a vague knowledge of the Broken Windows Theory, and how it can apply across a variety of social contexts. For the unacquainted, it’s simple: an inanimate object showing signs of neglect or a general lack of maintenance invites the further degeneration of its own physical condition, because the perpetrators causing further damage safely assume that the lack of stewardship will preclude any consequence to acts of vandalism. In short, if a building lets a single broken window remain unrepaired for long, in due time all the windows will end up broken. Shattering glass, is quick, easy, and usually anonymous; for those seeking a deviant outlet, it’s hard to think of a better option. Even graffiti—probably the next most popular means of exemplifying the Broken Window Theory—still requires the procurement of a certain object, the spray paint can, which investigators could easily trace to the perpetrator. Breaking a window can involve anything one finds on the ground. So in a structure perceived to be abandoned or long ignored, the windows are usually the first to go, then the graffiti artists tag it, and before long, thieves have most likely plundered it of all its copper.

Only a few large American cities are lacking in a certain district with a high concentration of abandoned structures. In some, the abandonment is relegated to the most disinvested areas; others are replete with them across the entire city limits. All too often, the diminished tax base that arises from a collection of unused buildings robs the city leaders of the best tools for tackling blight and abandonment, whether in the form of demolishing the most neglected buildings, restoring them, or—as is often the case—“securing” them by boarding up those windows. Plywood boards are frequently the first line of defense: they’re cheap, they effectively deter window breakers, and they pose a barrier for burglars. But they’re ugly, by most people’s perceptions. And they flag a structure as abandoned far more boldly than those without the boards; a building is obviously abandoned even from a distance if the windows are boarded, far more so even than if they’re uncovered and most are shattered.

And boarded windows essentially serve as a promotional canvas for graffiti artists. Already flagged as abandoned, the boards encourage those already enticed by delinquency to leave a mark on a hardened shell that is by this point reasonably impenetrable. A talented graffiti artist may create a breathtaking display on the side of the building, but the market tells us that graffito-strewn areas generally suffer far lower property values than those that lack it. (A more sociological assessment would surely reveal that it’s a chicken/egg dilemma, and the concomitant social problems in low income areas encourage abandonment and thus attract graffiti.) Regardless of the origins, securing vacant buildings with plywood may result in a stalemate: the boards amplify as many of the visual consequences of deviant behavior as they deflect.

Some communities have attempted other outlets at staving off blight by providing at least a rudimentary level of stewardship to their abandoned buildings beyond plywood. Camden, New Jersey is a city that, after decades of deindustrialization, has suffered far more disinvestment and abandonment than most, along with a heavily impoverished tax base that often stymies the City from being able to fund blight management. The image below reveals what I suspect is a civic-led initiative to mitigate the eyesore effect of those boards.

The photo comes from the neighborhood center of Fairview, the southernmost part of Camden. Three story multi-family housing surrounds a central park-like square in which I’m standing, flanked by first-floor retail at the corners (seen on the left in this photo). Despite the obvious signs of disinvestment, Fairview is still a curiosity in Camden: it was originally conceived in the 1910s as Yorkship Village, a carefully planned community of curvilinear streets, abundant shared green space, an inward-turning and self-sustaining neighborhood character, and a reasonable price range for its architecturally uniform rowhouses (and the occasional detached home). In short, it was a prototype for the Garden City, modeled after Ebenezer Howard’s conception that came to fruition in the form of Letchworth and Welwyn workers' communities in the UK just a few years prior. The Garden City movement never grew beyond a curious experiment on either side of the pond, but the surviving examples remain interesting footnotes to urban planners and scholars, while certain features to Garden Cities like Yorkship Village/Fairview have retained their cogency as manifested in the design of some suburban apartment blocks or Traditional Neighborhood Development (New Urbanist) projects across the country.

As Camden began sinking into a seemingly ineluctable economic decline caused by rapid deindustrialization in the mid-1900s, Fairview managed to hold its own for decades as a stable working class and lower middle class enclave. Cut off from the rest of the city by both an interstate highway and a creek, the only way for vehicles to reach Fairview was through the economically healthier city of Gloucester City to the south. As our tour guide told us from her experience growing up in the 1950s and 60s, it was like Mayberry—an analogy so popular that no further explanation is needed. Fortunes changed for Fairview in the 1980s, when the City of Camden built a bridge across the north branch of the Newton Creek, connecting it to the rest of the city. The City of Camden also absorbed Fairview into its school district. Previously, Fairview’s children had attended Gloucester City public schools; at the stroke of a pen, the city leadership shepherded Fairview’s student population into one of the worst performing districts in the state. The desirability of Fairview immediately plummeted—attributable more, I suspect, to the shifting school district than the construction of the bridge—and the community’s residents began selling their homes en masse. Within just a few years, this previously overwhelmingly white community with little poverty came to mirror the demographics and socioeconomics of the rest of Camden. The result is the same widespread abandonment visible throughout the rest of the city, seen in a photo below where I pivoted slightly to the right from the prior one:

Fairview remains one of highest-income census tracts in Camden, despite the fact that its socioeconomics place it significantly below the New Jersey average. A fair number of homes in Fairview may be boarded up, but few have been demolished. Virtually none are in danger of collapse. The same cannot be said of elsewhere in the city, which I featured in a blog post long ago. The rest of Camden ranks consistently as both the most crime-ridden and impoverished city in New Jersey as well as one of the worst in the country. Abandonment is everywhere; tall grass waves across the copious fields where much of the housing stock is already long abandoned.

These pictures are by now fairly old, taken about eight years ago. But Camden’s rank as a socioeconomic cellar dweller prevails. And though I haven’t visited Fairview in as many years, I suspect its status as Camden’s “healthiest” neighborhood endures as well. As superficial as it may seem, those painted boards on the first floor windows of the building at Fairview’s town center provide ample evidence: it’s the only place in a city replete with plywood where some agent has made the effort to spruce them up. It very well have been the Fairview Historic Society, the agency that provided us with a tour of the town and the anecdotes; it could have been a church group; it may be the product of an initiative from an independent activist. I don’t know what these buildings look like now, but at the time of these photos, the disinvestment in Fairview appeared far more recoverable than elsewhere in Camden: fewer broken windows, less graffiti, minimal structural compromise of the sort that would necessitate demolition. Though still distressed by most measurements, Fairview is indisputable less blighted than most of the rest of Camden. One could perhaps argue that Fairview declined much later than the rest of Camden; it’s still slightly better off and not yet visibly beyond hope of improvement, so of course the appearance is better. But abandonment can age structures remarkably quickly, and the twenty years or so that Fairview has ceased attracting middle class families is more than enough time for vandals to have broken the windows and plundered the interior piping. The painted boards here aren’t much. Many of them simply and crudely mimic what the windows would portray if the rooms inside still had inhabitants: flowers in vases, air conditioner window units, perched cats, people staring back out. But Fairview has a few more pairs of eyes and hands that are voluntarily keeping it afloat. Its unique configuration as a Garden City prototype may not have been enough to salvage it from its host municipality’s decline, but it would be hard to argue that it remains the neighborhood in Camden most likely to enjoy a renaissance.

One other city featured in this article that has attempted to minimize the impact of its abandonment through a brush and acrylics has fought back from a completely different hostile force—not deindustrialization, but the natural fury of a hurricane. Long Beach, Mississippi sits on the Gulf Coast, just east of the much larger and better-known cities of Gulfport and Biloxi. It has hosted a satellite campus of the University of Southern Mississippi, with a number of structures just feet from the beach.

The Category 3 & 4 winds and the storm surge induced by Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the Mississippi Coast, the other regional victim of a catastrophe in which New Orleans’ fate dominated international press coverage. The Gulf Coast didn’t marinate in floodwaters for weeks on end, the way New Orleans did; the overwhelming majority of the damage occurred overnight, so that recovery could begin within days. But the irrecoverable losses on the coast may actually be more severe: while many homes in New Orleans could be refurbished after they had been gutted and treated for mold, only foundations remained for a considerable number of Mississippi structures.

This Administration Building fared better than many other directly fronting the shore in Long Beach. Regardless of whether it is structurally intact, it is still standing. Though new buildings have risen since the storm, the majority of the Long Beach campus remains unrestored. Since this photo series was taken in June of this year, almost six years after Katrina—by veteran photographer Nici English—it is clear that the admin building has not been a demolition priority for the university. Plans to renovate it may be pending: though weathered looking, it does not show any indications that it is of eminent danger of collapse. And each one of the boards on the windows has a unique painting—though none are a surefire successor to Matisse, some show at least a moderately high level of skill and time commitment.

Similar to the apartment building in Camden where only the first-floor windowboards received artistic attention, only the front side of the USM Admin Building received a paint job; on one of the other sides, the windows are unsealed.

Like the building in Camden, few, if any, of the windows are broken—graffiti is nowhere to be seen. Long Beach is not an epicenter of deindustrialization the way Camden is, which means that the social ills that often elicit vandalism and other deviant behavior are not looming large in Long Beach the way they are in New Jersey’s poorest city. But graffiti can appear in a moderately unattended building in a cozy, affluent suburb just as easily as a community plagued by poverty or natural disaster; an intruder can break a window in an occupied house. But both criminal acts are more likely to occur on property that is unmonitored, even if only temporarily. The painting of boards on windows, though hardly a panacea to blight, provides a much-needed stamp of stewardship that may repel vandals from a building’s unbroken windows the way cedar repels moths from wool.

Drivable main streets, Part II: Concentrating the poverty.

The previous post explored one of the most unusual examples of apparent grassroots historic preservation in an essentially rural setting that has succeeded in spite of itself. St. Francisville, Louisiana has no explicit town center, yet the low vacancy levels suggest that the few scattered commercial buildings command higher than average rents for a town of its size. The historic residences are scattered broadly across a large patch of land that is generally not conducive for tours by foot, yet tourists apparently come visit, attend the periodic festivals, pay to explore the homes, eat at the restaurants, and browse the antiques. It is a town that has made the most with what little it has in terms of a concentrated historic architectural vernacular. It's quite an achievement, when one considers the countless small towns across America with far more distinct centers that struggle to secure even a resale shop. What did St. Francisville get right that has evaded so many other communities? The best way to plunge further into this analysis is to compare it to another Louisiana town, Donaldsonville, that has experienced a radically different turn of events.

My apologies for forgetting to mention in the first half of this two-part post what proves to be the fulcrum to this comparison: the fact that both towns are emerging bedroom communities to Baton Rouge, the state of Louisiana's capital and second largest city. St. Francisville sits about 25 miles to the north of the metropolitan area; the other town, Donaldsonville is about 40 miles to the south (35 as the crow flies). The 15-mile difference may very well be enough to degrade the farther town's potential as a bedroom community, but that is surely not the only obstacle. Donaldsonville has almost five times the population of St. Francisville, a characteristic manifested by simply comparing the street configuration of the two towns.

Unlike St. Francisville, it looks much more like a conventional American town, with a pronounced grid that seems oriented toward a body of water. However, despite its considerably greater size, Donaldsonville lacks virtually any of the prosperity.

Available online history on Donaldsonville isn't as robust as St. Francisville; incidentally, one of the best descriptions comes from the Institute of Southern Jewish Life, a site which I briefly referenced when exploring the former Jewish community in Donaldsonville, among several other towns in the Deep South. The site Gonomad relates how this town, perched along a high point (not quite a bluff) opposite a bend in the Mississippi River, has generally avoided catastrophic flooding over the two centuries since its founding. According to the City of Donaldsonville's website, the municipality capitalized on its opportune intersection of the Mississippi and Bayou Lafourche, the latter of which extends southward toward Grand Isle and ultimately to the Gulf of Mexico. The settlement that birthed Donaldsonville is one of the earliest recorded in Louisiana, decades older than St. Francisville or Bayou Sara, originating with Acadians expelled from Canada and Spanish Isleños from the Canary Islands. Falling under both French and Spanish rule before American control with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the town was officially incorporated in 1806 after its founding by wealthy English landowner William Donaldson, at a time when a significant portion of the regional population was still Francophone. Donaldson aggressively pushed for his town to become the state's capital, and for a brief period of 1829 to 1831, he succeeded in steering the center of government away from New Orleans, even though Donaldsonville's population at the time was less than 500. Inevitably, the capital returned downriver to the larger, noisier city; Baton Rouge did not become Louisiana's capital until 1849. Nonetheless, Donaldsonville thrived in middle of the 19^th century as a critical trading hub along the Mississippi, attracting a number of settlers up to the point that it was nearly destroyed during the Civil War. Railway service passing through Donaldsonville from New Orleans in 1871 bolstered the town's recovery.

The twentieth century brought different fortunes to Donaldsonville. The historical trajectory gets a bit cloudy at this point, though a website on Ascension Parish (in which Donaldsonville rests) accounts the area's general dependence on agriculture as an economic mainstay, which shifted in the 1950s and 1960s due to technological advancements, the introduction of new industries (particularly petrochemical), the construction of the Sunshine Bridge across the Mississippi five miles downriver of Donaldsonville, and, perhaps most cataclysmic, the connection of Baton Rouge and New Orleans through Interstate 10. All of these influences collectively altered the focus of economic activity in Ascension Parish—increasingly away from Donaldsonville. A map of the parish helps to illustrate this phenomenon:

The outline of Ascenion Parish is traced in purple. As the map indicates, Donaldsonville is an anomaly: it rests on the opposite side of the Mississippi River from 90% of the land area. Interstate 10 cuts the parish in half, just skirting the only two other incorporated areas, Gonzales and Sorrento. Tracing the interstate's path to the northwest, it leads directly to the outskirts of Baton Rouge. And Ascension Parish is absorbing much of Baton Rouge's outward suburban growth: it has consistently been one of the two or three fastest growing parishes in the state (sometimes number one) and its approximately 38% growth rate between the 2000 and 2010 Census places it among the fastest growing parishes/counties in the country. Within Louisiana, it has among the lowest poverty rates, the highest median income, and some of the highest rated public schools. Ascension Parish is, in short, a community for those seeking proximity to the state's capital but away from Baton Rouge's congestion, crime, and middling school system. By and large, the parish is flourishing.

But Donaldsonville isn't enjoying any of it. Isolated from the rest of the parish, its population is stagnating or declining. The poverty rate was a staggering 34.8% in 2000, and the median income in 2000 was about $24,000, barely half of $44,000 of the parish as a whole. Until mid-century, the town represented the highest concentration of population in this otherwise agrarian parish, and it remains the parish seat. But the center of gravity shifted as suburbanites flocked to other side (the “East Bank”) of the Mississippi because this side contains one of the nation's largest east-west arterials, in the form of I-10. An increasing number of government services have oriented themselves toward Gonzales, which, aside from being the approximate center of the parish, is within a 20-minute drive to 90% of the parish's population. The Ascension Parish Chamber of Commerce is based in Gonzales; Donaldsonville, perhaps recognizing its disassociation from the rest of the parish, has its own. Gonzales and its purlieus have received the lion's share of commercial building permits, so it boasts far more shopping and services. Recent estimates suggest that it now has about 1,000 more people than Donaldsonville, while the areas immediately to its west—unincorporated communities like Prairieville, Geismar, and Dutchtown—are surging with affluent newcomers. The divide, as is often the case, manifests racial disparities: Donaldsonville is overwhelmingly (approximately 70%) African American, while the remainder of the parish is even more disproportionately white.

Clearly Donaldsonville has its share of challenges. But one thing it doesn't lack is an intact, walkable town center of historic structures. It has far more than Gonzales, while the unincorporated areas such as Prairieville lack any discernible old center whatsoever. Donaldsonville also has plenty of extant old commercial buildings that our small towns hinge upon in order to reinvent themselves--such as St. Francisville. Unfortunately, my photograph collection of Donaldsonville pales in comparison to its more prosperous counterpart, but the few that I have still effectively convey some of Donaldsonville's character. Incidentally, most of them come from a walking tour of the town's historic core.

Railroad Avenue, the town's historic main street, offers multiple blocks of street level retail in widely varying levels of economic health. The building to the right in the photo below hosts a small restaurant.

Louisiana Square, the central park abutting Railroad Avenue, may not seem lively in these photos, but it is surrounded by housing and commercial establishments that endow it with centrality and visibility that would make it an optimal site for a community gathering.

The blocks surrounding the park and Railroad Avenue are probably the most affluent in the town. The churches and homes enjoy a level of upkeep that bears a passing resemblance to a handsome nook in Uptown New Orleans.

Railroad Avenue offers a number of small businesses that clearly demonstrate that the town is trying to assert itself for leisure visits, no doubt targeting much the same demographic that frequents St. Francisville on the weekends. The Grapevine Cafe and Gallery has done well at its Railroad Avenue location for a decade, with owners who saw promise in the architectural character of a building that was in serious disrepair at the time. The Victorian on the Avenue is a bed and breakfast that, like so many bed and breakfasts across the country, took advantage of an old Victorian home with ample bedrooms in a pedestrian-scaled area by restoring it to its new purpose. Cabahanosse, a few blocks further down Railroad Avenue, offers a similar bed/breakfast experience in a restored wood-frame house that featured a general store below and family residence above. Just around the corner from Railroad Avenue on Claiborne Street, Lafitte's Landing may embody the genesis of Donaldsonville's protracted efforts to revitalize through diligent supporters: founded in 1978 by chef John Folse in a refurbished plantation, the restaurant helped bring south Louisiana's vernacular cuisine a worldwide audience. For decades it was among the most celebrated restaurants in the region. Though today it appears that Lafitte's Landing and the Bittersweet Plantation bed and breakfast are a private facility, only open to customers of Chef John Folse and Company's specialty line of desserts, the restaurant and its proprietor were instrumental in elevating Donaldsonville into the region's consciousness as more than just a struggling old river town.

I'm not particularly fond of cherry-picking individual businesses as a means of illustrating a broader socioeconomic trend: establishments such as the ones above come and go, and I could have just as easily picked four others to assert an entirely point regarding Donaldsonville's historic character. But I mention these in particular because their price points clearly do coincide with the expected offerings of a town with such low median incomes and such high poverty. Outside of Railroad Avenue and the central Louisiana Square, the prosperity of Donaldsonville almost immediately plummets.

The poorer districts within the town are characterized by abandonment and vacant lots where homes undoubtedly once stood.

I didn't feel comfortable taking photos while with a tour group in some of the most impoverished areas, but a simple visit to Google Streetview, particularly in the west side of town, will review the economic conditions in much of Donaldsonville.

The aforementioned businesses—the Grapevine, the Lafitte's Landing—obviously target an affluent demographic and would fit much better in a picturesque town unencumbered by the social disarray that has befallen Donaldsonville. In short, they'd work in St. Francisville—except that these meager photos demonstrate far more of a walkable street grid in Donaldsonville than one can ever hope to encounter in its more prosperous counterpart to the north. At 2.5 square miles, it’s not a large city; its 2000 population density of nearly 3000 people per square mile makes Donaldsonville city limits more densely populated than quite a few large American cities. St. Francisville’s incorporated area is almost as large but with a fraction of the population; the density in 2000 was only about 935 people per square mile. Donaldsonville evidently has its share of boosters: both the entrepreneurs who value the extensive array of historic buildings in close proximity to one another, as well as the customers who patronize their businesses. Like St. Francisville, it boasts a number of picturesque plantation homes, many in excellent condition, which could attract tourists. But these blandishments haven’t been enough to reinvent the place. The tour that elicited these photos didn't meander through Donaldsonville in order to soak in the atmosphere; we were there for a community outreach forum to help residents envision solutions for one of south Louisiana’s most distressed towns.

The maps and photos collectively demonstrate why St. Francisville and Donaldsonville serve as such interesting counterparts. The one with all the physical characteristics of quaint Americana in a condensed, navigable format continues to flounder. Conversely, a smattering of old buildings loosely linked into a rural hamlet by two highways achieves the reputation of one of the most desirable small towns in the state. The fundamental demographic differences between the two have received more than enough attention in this report. Other, smaller distinctions may also have a bearing: for example, while both towns are part of the Louisiana Main Street association, only St. Francisville appears to have its own active and organized operation. If the Donaldsonville Downtown Development District still exists, its website shows no indication, as it appears to be defunct. As mentioned earlier, St. Francisville also enjoys the benefit of being 15 miles nearer to Baton Rouge, the closest metropolitan area and an economic engine. Commute times from St. Francisville would inevitably be shorter than from Donaldsonville, so St. Francisville’s proximity gives it an added advantage as a bedroom community. In addition, the greater size of Donaldsonville results in a greater trade area, even if it’s considerably less affluent: Donaldsonville has attracted a Wal-Mart on its outer reaches, as well as some other big-box stores. St. Francisville is too small to lure most if not all of the national chains. While I maintain that Wal-Mart is not as huge of a detriment to Main Street’s prosperity as many claim, it does serve to bifurcate the retail activity in Donaldsonville—a problem St. Franicsville simply does not have to face. Unless a new vendor chooses to develop on raw land around St. Francisville, it will have to lease one of those few small commercial buildings; the town doesn’t have any strip malls. Lastly, St. Francisville has the benefit of a large annual event, the Audubon Pilgrimage, that elevates its awareness among the public in the region; Donaldsonville cannot claim an equivalent big-ticket item.

If the widely divergent trajectories of these two towns could be summarized by a single entity, it would have to involve collective human demand. The human capital that has animated St. Francisville into an unlikely leisure destination offers testament to how much people are willing to vote with their pocketbooks; this is hardly a profound insight. But Donaldsonville’s modest cosmetic improvements to the oldest districts in recent years have scarcely compensated for the net loss of the same capital: the majority of people leaving Donaldsonville these days are (if the community forum I attended last year offers any example) upwardly mobile African Americans who achieved the income level to seek greener pastures, leaving more of the disenfranchised minorities and well-meaning “artsy” entrepreneurs with money to burn, whose visions for improvement the town may not be adversarial but certainly do not coincide either. The characteristics that make St. Francisville seem nondescript and sprawling may very well be the lynchpin to its success at the expense of Donaldsonville: its lifeblood is in its role as a bedroom community, and St. Francisville simply offers the built environment that people seeking exurban living typically love: large plots of land, no traffic, economic homogeneity, minimal crime. A walkable historic main street like Donaldsonville’s Railroad Avenue is expendable. Even if Donaldsonville had a poverty rate under 5%, it may struggle to ignite as a genuinely attractive small town, because there simply aren’t enough people who want to live in houses so close to one another. (After all, if they truly desire walkability that much, why not move to New Orleans, or one of the older neighborhoods in Baton Rouge? For that matter, plenty of walkable urban inter-city neighborhoods continue to languish while the sprawling exurbs grow like a weed.) The low density that St. Francisville ostensibly had to overcome in order to metamorphose into a classic small town may ultimately approve its most sustaining selling point. Donaldsonville, conversely, may depend upon a more radical paradigm than just the John Folses and other first-generation urbanites who are attracted to its compact historic core. There are plenty of those around without Donaldsonville’s 35% poverty rate. This conclusion makes the prognosis seem bleak for Donaldsonville, but at least a few proprietors have had a decade or more of success with their restaurants/cafés/bed and breakfasts to prove otherwise. And if St. Francisville can do it, so can hundreds of other small communities facing their own distinct challenges.

Drivable Main Streets, Part I: Quaint, picturesque sprawl.

Despite all hullabaloo raised by various talking heads on the dire state of small town America—and it is true that much of it continues to depopulate, as it has for the past fifty years—not all rural communities have fallen into ineluctable decline. And high hopes prevail for many of the others that seem as though their main streets have been massacred by Wal-Mart, or Food Land, or whatever the scapegoat appears to be for the Town of X. Most historians and social scientists persist in arguing that Wal-Mart has devastated the retail culture of rural America, and the snarky tone of my previous sentence should reveal my skepticism toward that truism. The fact remains that many small towns are populated by largely vacant old buildings, and yes, those buildings are increasingly falling into disrepair, and indeed, sometimes their deteriorated condition places them beyond the point of no return. But a town’s reinvention does not depend exclusively on the existing structures in the historic center: some have revitalized as tourist destinations despite losing a portion of the original structures to parking lots, but those parking lots prove essential to attract visitors who otherwise wouldn’t bite if they could find an easy place to stash their vehicle while they stroll the main street. Small towns are also just as amenable to infill development as gentrifying inner city neighborhoods in the big old metropolises. Relatively few have enjoyed the bounties of infill development, simply because real estate speculators see little incentive in terms of an adequate ROI in a depressed, isolated, rural community. But nothing about the existing built environment of an old downtown inherently precludes it from enjoying at least a chance of a renaissance.

I’m aware of no better proof that even the most unlikely small town can overcome the odds and revitalize than the hamlet of St. Francisville, Louisiana.

The truth is, I use the term “revitalize” hesitatingly, because I don’t really know if St. Francisville ever suffered disinvestment. It looks good: a number of impeccably maintained turn-of-the-century structures, green spaces under complete canopy by some mighty Southern live oak trees in bountiful health, fully occupied storefronts featuring art, antiques, confections, and restaurants that delicately straddle eclectic and unpretentious. The general upkeep of the town appears fantastic, except for one small problem: it doesn’t show much evidence at all that it’s a town. An unfamiliar motorist could pass through and just think that he or she stumbled across a mile-long stretch of particularly nice homes and a few mom-and-pops. I don’t want to suggest that “there is no there there” because, frankly, to many users of that phrase have corrupted it from Gertrude Stein's original intent, to apply loosely to any place that lacks “character”. And I simply don't feel that a truly characterless place exists. But St. Francisville certainly doesn't meet most of the standards of most historically significant small towns. Just try to find the center of St. Francisville through the street configuration on this map:

It looks like little more than the convergence of a few rural highways. No conventional street grid, no railway or train depot, no port along a river. And, from what it appears, no historic main street. As far as I could determine, the pictures below more or less encapsulate the downtown. The picture below features what I would presume to be the historic center of St. Francisville, at the convergence of the two primary streets, Commerce Street (State Route 3057) and Ferdinand Street:

It's hard to tell if this is a center, because a gas station and a Ford dealership hardly comprise the conventional center of a historic American town—at least not one that survived the wrecking ball. Yet one could hardly claim that the ravages of time have laid St. Francisville to waste; it has dozens of structures listed on the National Register of Historic Places. How did this unusually tightly-knit rural settlement get started?

According to the town's website, the bluffs around the area attracted Spanish settlers in the late 18^th century, where Capuchin monks used the high ground to build a monastery and cemetery at the site. Eventually the area developed into the district of Nueva Feliciana, the political capital of the Florida Parishes, which includes all the Louisiana parishes (counties) north of Lake Pontchartrain and east of the Mississippi River—the original westernmost reaches of the Florida territories. But it was not St. Francisville that initially flourished as the regional center; that role fell to Bayou Sara, a town resting below the bluffs along a similarly named waterway that helped it serve briefly as the most important Mississippi cotton port between New Orleans and Memphis. St. Francisville achieved greater prestige during the period in which the ownership of Florida Territories was ambiguous because British, French, Spanish, and American colonizers could not clarify the exact boundaries of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. The town served as the capital of the Republic of West Florida for a brief period in 1810 when British settlers in the area overthrew Spanish rule, until Americans claimed ownership of the land under the terms of the Louisiana Purchase. Meanwhile, Bayou Sara met its demise before the Civil War, succumbing to fires, repeated flooding and the ravages of the boll weevil. Virtually nothing survives today. But the expansive plantations and estates of St. Francisville, the town “two miles long and two yards wide”, prevailed throughout the 19^th century up to the present.

The configuration of buildings in St. Francisville demonstrates the appropriateness of the above nickname. The photograph below on Ferdinand Street reveals what is probably the highest density arrangement of structures in the entire town, and one of the only stretches where commercial buildings rest immediately adjacent to one another.

Step back further along that same road, and it hardly bears any evidence of a conventional small town American main street.

The buildings predominantly look more like converted private residences, rather than structures intended for commercial purposes. Most have front porches and a fenestration that promotes privacy, instead of expansive windows for the display of goods. The buildings on the other side of the street seem a bit more oriented toward retail.

It would appear that someone who has invested in St. Francisville took a Streetscape Improvements 101 course: aesthetic brick sidewalks, customized street markers, hanging wooden signs outside each storefront. More critical, though, is the general absence of setbacks; most of these buildings are built right up to the street. Scattered intermittently across this streetscape are buildings that have clearly always been oriented toward retail, in varying levels of upkeep:

I suppose the building below could have been a country inn at one time:

But next to most of these isolated structures are more buildings that clearly began as private residences. A few have most likely been retrofitted for commercial or retail use:

Still, something seems a bit fishy—something undermining the credibility of this main street. Look at the photos below, taken from a different stretch of the long artery that comprises most of the town, this time on the Commerce Street side of that one major intersection. Then compare them to some of the previous photographs.

Unlike some of the earlier streetscapes, the setbacks here are much larger. But common to both photos—virtually all the pictures so far, in fact—is the abundance of curb cuts. Gaps in the curb are essential for vehicular access, and all but a handful of the zero-setback structures have them. Curb cuts usually equate to driveways, and driveways suggest that many, if not most, of these buildings are oriented to allow for vehicles. And if the spacing between buildings is wide enough for driveways, or the setbacks allow for one or two off-street parking spaces in front, the buildings themselves almost definitely date from the 20^th century. Think back on a well preserved commercial main street or town square, like, for example the one in Brazil, Indiana that I featured in this blog many moons ago. The buildings sit right next to one another. No room for cars to park between or in front of buildings, because cars either didn’t exist yet, or they weren’t ubiquitous enough to justify dedicated off-street parking.

Like any picture-perfect vintage main street, St. Francisville has on-street parking, as evidenced by the photos. But it also has enough gaps between buildings, and between the road/sidewalk and the buildings, to allow for off-street parking as well, pushing the structures apart from one another and making the entire environment less conducive for walking as a means of getting around. These photos offer a reasonable amount of proof: they come from early evening on a Thursday night, and not a soul is outside. Sure, the antique stores would have closed, but not the cafes and restaurants. But here’s what the ostensible restaurant district of St. Francisville looks like:

The restaurants are doing fine. They’re open for business. They just have their own dedicated off-street parking and don’t require anyone to walk along St. Francisville’s sidewalks to get there. Nobody really needs to be outside. The handsome town park sits just as empty:

The real attraction of the town—the essence of its historic credentials and the bulk of the National Register properties—are the stately plantations and private residences that dot the outskirts of the town on Royal Street and Prosperity Street, sometimes almost a mile from the main intersection captured in so many of the above photos. These plantations and stately homes bring regional weekend visitors, which are most likely the real lifeblood of the town’s retail.

Most of these homes have signs indicating their age:

Yes, the sign to the right references Sotheby’s, the international realty company. Apparently the sellers of this house believe that they might be able to attract a foreign buyer.

Some of the structures appear to be old commercial buildings that have since been retrofitted to private residences, an inverse of what the earlier photographs on Ferdinand Street depicted.

An unusually large building to house a church office:

And this final building defies all conventions:

In terms of square footage, it is probably the single largest commercial structure in all of St. Francisville. Yet it sits far removed from the center of town, on what is otherwise a residential street. And most of these residential streets, while reasonably walkable, are hardly compact. (They have curb cuts too.)

Other residential nooks in St. Francisville reveal family-run businesses have wooden signs (advertising a bed and breakfast, in this case, I believe) but no sidewalks.

This is a city far easier explored by car than by foot. And, more importantly, it is one of the most unusual pastiches of antique, pseudo-antique, and conventional twentieth century. My own suspicions, judging from the unusual scattering of commercial structures from widely different time periods of construction, is that the town did go through periods of mild booms and busts, resulting in an uneven development process that never really asserts itself through a historic core. Essentially, it enjoyed incremental infill development before such a investors' approach had any conscious attempt at revitalization. The Wikipedia article on the city suggests that some of the old remnants of the ghost town on Bayou Sara were hauled up to the bluff in the early 20^th century and planted in St. Francisville. (That large brick two-story structure seems like the most likely candidate, if this story is legitimate.) Whatever the truth may be, St. Francisville is among the most rarefied small towns I’ve seen that still manages a certain cachet. My descriptions up to this point would no doubt suggest that I have a low opinion of the place, which is not true. I just find it quite surprising that it could retain a potent identity when it could easily have devolved into a humble rural intersection, barely more than Bayou Sara.

But what motivated people to let these homes survive, or to haul old buildings from Bayou Sara up the bluff so that they begin a second life? I have my suspicions as to why the residents of St. Francisville cared enough about their community to achieved what so few others have. But it is easier to explore this Francisville phenomenon in comparison to another Louisiana town not so far away, which I will do in the second half of this larger-than-expected blog post.