Blog Post No. 2010-12: Residential infill done perfectly...

...and not so perfectly

1

2

3
4

5
6

Locations: 16 Fairview Street and 26 Mendum Street, Roslindale, MA



Years of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2001 and 1956



Photos: (1) Looking up Fairview Street, showing the adjacent house and 16 Fairview; (2) A closer uphill view of the house at 16 Fairview, the driveway, and entrance; (3) Front view, with entrance, wrap-around porch, and front facade; (4) Looking back down Fairview; (5) Scale comparison shot for 26 Mendum Street (it's the little yellow house on the right, partially hidden by the street tree); (6) Broader view of 26 Mendum.



The Story: You can actually see the rear of 16 Fairview from my backyard. It was built just a year after we moved to the Peters Hill section of Roslindale. I've met the resident builder-owner -- Bill Re -- a few times and most recently seen him at the site of a residential rehab project he's doing around the corner on Symmes Street. My poor photos, taken late in the day last week, really don't do his house justice. It is about as perfect a job of doing residential infill as you're likely to find anywhere. The scale of the house is right, it sits up on the street, and it has great detailing in a Victorian style without being overbearing. Every time I walk by this house, I especially appreciate the strong statement made by the wrap-around porch. Porches are ubiquitous in Roslindale, as in many other former streetcar suburbs built in Boston around the turn of the last century. But getting a porch right is not easy. Too often, the porches on new houses are too shallow to be usable, ending up as little more than appliques that are sort of nice to look at (unless you realize they're too shallow to fulfill their supposed purpose). The architects here were Vozzella Design Group, a Roslindale outfit with offices near the Forest Hills MBTA station. They are to be commended for a job very well done.



I am aware that Vozzella designed the house because I checked out the City's online building permit information for the property as part of a very small research experiment that produced the precise results I thought it would. Given how absolutely right-on this house is, how it is scaled and located like every other house on the street, how well it agrees with its surroundings and practically proves the point that you can in fact build new houses that work just as well aesthetically as old ones, the uninitiated might think that the process for approval of this house was easy. All Bill Re had to do was walk down to the Boston Inspectional Services Department with Vozzella Design's plans in hand, pay the appropriate fee, and pull a building permit to make his neighborhood a better place, right? Alas, my friends, that was not the case here. And it is not the case in the vast majority of American cities and towns, even to this day. You see, the City's zoning for Roslindale as it existed in 2000-2001 outlawed this kind of house. Yes, Bill could build a single-family house here, but it had to abide by the dimensional requirements for the City's old, 1950s-era R-.5 (Residential -- 0.5 ratio between the floor area of the house and the area of the lot) zoning district. So, in order to build this pitch-perfect piece of infill, Bll had to obtain relief from a variety of dimensional standards that screamed "Levittown!" not "Roslindale," among them: too-narrow side yards, too little street frontage, too small a lot, too-shallow rear yard, etc. Bill therefore found himself in a several month-long process run through the City's Board of Appeal that, ultimately, let him do the right thing. Roslindale's zoning has, in the last few years, been rewritten and brought into line with the more recently-adopted standards governing the City's other neighborhoods. I confess that I haven't checked to see whether this house would still require relief under the new provisions, but I hope it wouldn't.

Put another way, the zoning code of the 1950s was built for some bizarre parallel universe version of Roslindale (and much of the rest of Boston's neighborhoods) that would someday become, well, pretty much entirely like the house at 26 Mendum Street, shown in the last 2 photos and also on Peters Hill, a few more blocks up the hill on the last street before the Arboretum itself. I'm picking on 26 Mendum in particular because friend and ace realtor Linda Burnett (a.k.a., "Roslinda") lives in this house, takes great care of it, and has agreed that it's OK for me to show it as a counter-example to Bill Re's house. In short, Linda is happy, as a realtor, to own the ugliest house on a great block. And it really is. It isn't a total disaster, but it is out of scale with every other house on Mendum Street, which are generally 2 1/2 to 3 stories in height with steep roof pitches, generous floor-to-ceiling heights, and deep porches. This house, perhaps not surprisingly, was actually built in 1956 according to the City's records. You can immediately imagine that the house would be perfectly acceptable in a neighborhood of similar houses (Levittown again). But here, given the character of the street and the surrounding neighborhood, it's a missed opportunity that is nearing its 55th anniversary. And yes, you guessed it, this house did not require any relief from the zoning code's provisions back in the 1950s. Perverse is perhaps too strong a word to use to describe the effect of the woefully-misapplied zoning code that Roslindale once had. But it would be accurate.

Blog Post No. 2010-11: Words to live by...

if you want to actually get something done (First in a continuing series)


Saturday's Boston Globe carried a story by correspondent Robert Preer entitled "Not even a whisper against this wind farm." Preer's piece is about a proposed wind farm in the town of Wareham that, unlike the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound and another major wind farm proposal at Brodie Mountain in Berkshire County, is moving through the state's environmental review process with a minimum of controversy and appears headed toward construction commencement this year. Now, the narrative here is a bit odd, as you can tell from the headline alone. It's almost as if the Globe can't believe that a wind farm proposal of any magnitude can actually get through the approval process without the usual circus of NIMBYs (both reasonable and unreasonable), climate change critics, and general naysayers. Obvious substantive differences that distinghish the Wareham project, dubbed the "Bog Wind Power Cooperative," from a project like Cape Wind include size (8 turbines for Bog Wind vs. 130 turbines for Cape Wind, lessening the visual impact), location (inland in Wareham instead of offshore in Nantucket Sound, near major highways and power lines), and immediate, deeply invested local project supporters (in the cranberry farm owners where the turbines will be located (hence the "bog" and "cooperative" elements of the project name) as opposed to Cape Wind's federal waters location).


All of the foregoing is true, but I want to focus on what I believe is an absolute MONEY quote from Glen Berkowitz, the president of Beaufort Windpower, the Boston-based company that is leading the project. This quote reveals what may be the real difference maker between Bog Wind and projects like them that seem to move quickly through the review process and the many, many other projects that hit huge snags and erupt in disastrous controversy. Says Berkowitz, about halfway through the article:

"We want to design, permit, and build the project in a way that creates public trust."

Don't we all want this? Don't developers want this? Don't project neighbors want this? Don't elected officials and municipal staff want this? Don't environmental advocates want this? Doesn't the public at large want this?

Yet, this seldom happens. Initially, the public attitude is almost always going to be one of distrust and suspicion. Everyone thinks they've seen this show before -- the greedy developer will screw the local townspeople and move on to their next opportunity to do the same someplace else. To a greater extent than we realize, we've been programmed to believe that any physical change in our community will make it worse -- more development necessarily means more traffic, more noise, more environmental degradation, and more people. And, of course, given most of what we've built over the last 60+ years in this country, project opponents aren't necessarily wrong. That said, it takes massive quantities of patience, belief in what you're doing, and confidence to not be put off by the inevitable first reaction and keep working in an open and inclusive way that (hopefully) gives everyone time and space to come to terms with something new and different. It looks like Glen Berkowitz may have substantial measures of all three traits. For that, he is to be saluted and he is therefore our first RTUF Words to Live By if You Want to Actually Get Something Done awardee. Thank you, Glen.

Blog Post No. 2010-10: And this too restores the urban fabric:

Renovation of the Brewer Fountain is finally complete!

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

The Photos: (1) and (2): Set-up shots, looking roughly northeast from the Common toward downtown; (3) Looking at the fountain and then across Tremont Street to St. Paul's Cathedral (the classical building with fronting colonnade); (4), (5), and (6): Close-ups of the lower and upper groups of statues; and (7) Looking from Tremont Street back up the hill toward the State House (golden domed building in the background).

Location: The Brewer Fountain, Boston Common, near the intersection of Park, Winter, and Tremont Streets, Boston, MA. MAP.

The Story: So, the Globe ran a very good story on this the other day. That would be the day after the day that the fountain was turned back on after an extensive renovation over the last almost 12 months brought this gem of a fountain back to life. As the article describes, the fountain was inoperable for the last several years, and has been restored with a combination of city, federal, and privately-raised funds. This piece of news points up a fact of life in late 20th century/early 21st century America, and a critical truth about urban life.

First, the fact: The fountain's stature as the oldest fountain on the Common was not enough to save it from such dramatic neglect that it stopped working altogether in 2003 and became so deteriorated in the years that followed that its restoration apparently became, in the end, an urgent matter needed to keep it from being a total loss. This kind of neglect of critical public infrastructure, from fountains to bridges to transit systems, from water mains to sewers and just about everything that we have inherited from prior generations as our built inheritance, is epidemic. Public budgets are always too thin to maintain everything, and politics are always such that building new things and having ribbon cutting ceremonies will almost always win out over the boring tasks that keep the things we have already in a good state of repair. Of course, it costs more overall to let those things wear down to such an extent that they require massive repair and restoration. But that is the way of it.

Second, the truth: The urban fabric most certainly includes major public amenities like the Brewer Fountain. That the fountain is now working again and playing its role in beautifying and enhancing a hugely important location in Boston -- right on the Common, near one of the busiest stations on the MBTA, just down the hill from the State House -- is more important to the city's sense of well-being and fulfillment than might at first seem the case. Broken fountains are like broken windows, in a sense. When anyone -- a resident of Boston, a visitor from elsewhere in the Commonwealth, someone from out-of-state or from another country -- sees a fountain this beautiful and obviously important not working, there is a sense that the city is not capable of taking care of its own, that it lacks capacity, that is not working. On the other hand, when it is working, one gets the impression that the city is just the opposite: a place where things work, that cares about keeping its iconic places in good shape, that is putting its best foot forward. Come check it out next time you're in town...

Blog Post No. 2010-9: Washington Beech is just the latest in a line...

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9


...of HOPE VI redevelopments here in Boston



Location: 4560 Washington Street, Roslindale, MA (Boston Housing Authority's Washington-Beech project, currently undergoing redevelopment) (MAP)

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2010-2012

The Photos: In order, taking a walk through the first phase of the redevelopment, from a new Beechland Street and along the backs of the attached town houses (Photos 1 and 2), up along a new Beechland Circle past the town houses and row houses toward Washington Street (Photos 3 and 4), looking down Washington Street toward downtown Boston with the large multi-family building on the right (Photo 5), then from across Washington Street back toward the site (Photo 6), an internal street and sidewalk area detail shot (Photo 7), and finishing with two photos from the intersection of Beechland Circle and Beechland Street looking up toward Beech Street (Photo 8) and toward Washington Street (Photo 9).

The Story: By now, the story of how the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has funded the redevelopment of hundreds of distressed public housing projects across the county is almost as well known as the distress of those properties to begin with. Almost, but not quite. I'm sure most can easily name one or two of the truly horrific public housing projects such as Cabrini-Green in Chicago that became poster children for everything that was wrong with urban America in the 1970s and 1980s. That list at one time included Columbia Point in Boston, which was one of the first public housing project redevelopments in the late 1980s.

HUD's HOPE VI program (the acronym stands for "Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere") emerged in the early 1990s as part of the department's response to the report of the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing. The report put the capstone on 30 years of withering, across-the-board criticism of public housing projects in the U.S. as generally dead-end disasters designed, constructed, and under-maintained in a manner that ultimately maximized alienation and separation from the broader community through super-blocks, high-rise construction that offered a twist on the Corbusian "Tower in the Park," and a lack of "defensible space." Among that report's major recommendations was prioritizing the redevelopment of the most distressed public housing projects into mixed-income, mixed housing-type neighborhoods that would reconnect with their surrounding communities both socio-economically and physically.


The physical, urban design component of HOPE VI has always been viewed as integral to the program, reflecting the significant influence of the Congress for the New Urbanism on HUD policy under the Clinton Administration. That administration's first HUD secretary, Henry Cisneros, was hismelf a signatory to the Charter of the New Urbanism in 1996. The guidelines for the HOPE VI program sent strong signals that HUD was serious about the urban design elements of each redevelopment. By and large and even as the HOPE VI program was put on life support by the second Bush Administration, that has meant that HOPE VI redevelopments fit much better with their surrounding communities. In fact, it's often a bit difficult to tell that they are even publicly-assisted housing. In Boston, HOPE VI redevelopments have included Mission-Main in Jamaica Plain, Orchard Gardens in Roxbury, and Maverick Gardens in East Boston. These redevelopments share an important feature with Washington-Beech: they were all done by the Boston Housing Authority with the help of Trinity Financial, a local developer that has also completed HOPE VI projects in Connecticut (Quinnipiac Terrace) and Rhode Island (Newport Heights).


As can be seen from the photos and the images below, Washington Beech is a true HOPE VI redevelopment from an urban design standpoint. It has mixed unit types in a variety of building types -- apartment building, row house, and attached town-house -- that respect and contribute to the surrounding and internal street network. The street network provides for real streets with curbs and sidewalks, on-street parking, and other elements that reflect a serious commitment to the public realm. The redevelopment also provides a centrally-located and publicly-accessible park space in the playground and basketball court.


All of this is to be contrasted with what existed here for the prior 50+ years: bare utilitarian brick structures located in a pattern that suggested a military encampment far more than a residential community. No real attention was paid to the street and the buildings were all surrounded almost uniformly by asphalt. Photos 6, 7, and 9 provide some particular points of comparison between old and new. Among them, I think Photo 7's depiction of the new sidewalk, curbing, street lights against the essentially undifferentiated treatment of the street on the opposite side is most instructive. And to take it a step further, it should not be surprising to see a dumpster facing into the street between the two older buildings on the right. In the old pattern, there really was no front, back or side to any of the buildings. They simply floated in an asphalt pond that meant it didn't really matter where you put something like a dumpster. In the new design, each buidling and therefore each set of units has clearly defined front (on the street), side, and back sides, providing an understandable logic for the location of entrances, utilities, and services (such as trash and general household storage). To say that the redeveloped Washington Beech will fit into the surrounding neighborhood far better than its predecessor is merely to state the obvious.


As can also be seen in the photos, the first phase is nearly complete and RTUF understands a ribbon-cutting will be held at the site on Saturday, June 29 at 11 am. Subsequent phases will fill in the rest of the overall site plan over the next 2 years.

RTUF sketch of the restored urban fabric: No hand-sketches this time. Instead, a link to the City of Boston's Assessing Department database for the pre-redevelopment configuration here, and an image provided by Trinity Financial (with credit to Icon Architecture), of the redevelopment's overall site plan (with Washington Street located at the top of the plan).

Blog Post No. 2010-8: Three Things...

Really in no particular order

Ok, maybe some order:

1. More on City Hall Plaza. As a follow-up to the last post regarding Boston City Hall Plaza, Kara Wilbur forwarded me a link to a Providence Journal blog piece by Martin Brussat from yesterday entitled "Boston City Hall Plaza as it ought to be." The vision there, by Robert Helfand, is certainly arresting and presents a far more tightly-woven street network through the plaza than we now have. For instance, it brings Hanover Street up the hill from its current terminus at Congress Street all the way to Cambridge Street, restores Brattle Street around the Sears Crescent, and creates a new cross-street that does a little eyebrow around what is apparently a new Boston City Hall built in a full-throttle classical style. In addition to the new City Hall, we have a central fountain, a campanile, a low-rise replacement for what is now the JFK Federal Building, and a row of new buildings along the Congress Street frontage now occupied by the existing City Hall. There's even a new apparently classically-inspired version of the Government Center MBTA station headhouse. I confess to liking the vision a lot and wanting to sit on the edge of the fountain and watch what might be happening in the plaza. I also confess to thinking that the vision veers dangerously close to the intentional amnesia of those who brought us the current plaza. The vision would be a massive departure from the present and the last almost 50 years making it almost seem like it never happened. As my post suggested, I'm not convinced we need to go quite that far to see some progress and get a better plaza.

2. Performance art + urban planning. Russ Preston's blog -- Life + Urbanism -- recently linked to a really interesting exercise in performance art plus urban planning down in Dallas. Texas. The idea was to simulate a pedestrian-oriented set of buildings and streetscape on a one-block stretch of what is now, by the look of things, a fairly auto-oriented street in the city's Oak Cliff section. The original intent was to use "crowdsourced placemaking" to create a fun, rewarding place -- a "Better Block" -- over a single weekend and for just a $1,000 up front. There's a lot packed into what is shown on the videos, blog posts, and online news articles that are linked together at the Bike Friendly Oak Cliff site. Impressive stuff. I especially like the way the blogger at Bike Friendly Oak Cliff refers to his fellow travelers as "BFOCers." Seriously, though, guerrilla urbanism has a place in the toolkit, no doubt.

3. And on it goes. I'm really not sure what to make of the extremely public way that developer Don Chiofaro is taking on the Mayor over height limits and development potential on the Greenway here in Boston. I mean, I thought the multiple-article frontal assault through the pages of the Boston Globe was a bold enough move. But when you call a press conference, as Chiofaro did late last month, for the express purpose of calling out someone who is now in his 5th term as the Mayor of Boston and really isn't that old, you're playing with fire. Maybe the thinking is that the Mayor is eventually going to be gone and Chiofaro plans on being around when that happens. Maybe he thinks his relationship with the Mayor can't get worse, and so he's got nothing to lose. Who knows? It's certainly a different way of going about things. We here at RTUF will keep our friends around this great country of ours updated as this continues to unfold.

Blog Post No. 2010-7: For City Hall Plaza, maybe continuously rotating temporary uses makes sense...

1 2

3 4

...at least for now

Location: Government Center (formerly Scollay Square, and today alternatively called Boston City Hall Square or City Hall Plaza), Boston, MA. (MAP)

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: Ongoing (April 2010).

The Photos: Taken on Patriots' Day 2010, looking northwest along the side of City Hall, then coming into the plaza and looking north and northeast at the Big Apple Circus tent.

The Story: So, we took the kids to the Big Apple Circus on City Hall Plaza last Friday night. We had a great time at a show of almost 2 hours in length, featuring the return of Bello Nock and a number of classic circus acts such as juggling, acrobatics, and (my personal favorite, especially now since we have a rescue puppy of our own) a dog act featuring (you guessed it) rescue dogs. Really fun stuff for the whole family.

But this entry is not about the circus itself, fun though it was. It's about the temporary life and activity and yes, restoration of the urban fabric, that can occur when even something as simple as a circus with a tent is brought onto City Hall Plaza. A plaza which has ripened into perhaps the most underperforming centrally-located public space in Boston, if not all of New England and if not the country. I mean, it's really bad, especially considering its proximity to so much great urban fabric and activity. I touched a bit on the plaza in the post about Boston's "mid-century modern" buildings a few weeks ago. It is truly of a piece with the failed buildings with whom it entered our cityscape in the mid-1960s. Most of the time it is a wind-swept, shade-less, inhospitable no-man's land that people hurry through to get from a dreadful MBTA headhouse for the Government Center Station

[especially when compared to what it replaced

(CREDIT: http://www.bambinomusical.com/)]

to everything that surrounds the plaza -- Boston City Hall itself, Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market across Congress Street, the Old State House around the corner at the intersection of Court and Washington, the state government complex up the hill, and the federal government's buildings on the north side of the plaza. When you think of the number of people who go around and through it on a daily basis, it's something of a twisted accomplishment that the space is so dead.

This failed state of affairs at the very center of the city has not gone entirely unnoticed, especially in the last 10 to 15 years. Proposals have been floated and special task forces created to improve the plaza itself and make the buildings around it work better. After extensive discussion and effort from some of the city's most talented and influential citizens, there has been relatively little to show. Physically, all that has happened is the construction of a series of benches and small balconies along the Cambridge Street frontage with vertical, flagpole-like lighting elements (see photo 4, above). The only obvious programmatic progress has been a seasonal farmers' market that sets up just along that Cambridge Street frontage on certain weekdays in the summer. Most recently, the Boston Globe ran a piece about a design contest for ideas to better integrate City Hall itself into the urban fabric. The proposals highlighted are interesting and I do like the way the winning entry opens up the Congress Street side of the building and introduces a cafe at the lower plaza level.

Far be it from this blog to criticize incremental changes and developments like these. Yet the fact remains that chipping away at the edges is not doing enough to change the plaza's sub-par dynamic. To do that, something needs to be happening in the middle of the plaza on a consistent basis. Now, since the Patriots, Red Sox, and Celtics have all won titles in their respective professional leagues this decade, there have been 6 victory parades (the City likes to call them "Rolling Rallies") that have wound past and sometimes ended at City Hall Plaza, so that's brought some crowds onto the plaza. And the City has set up a few major events, sometimes for extended periods, on the plaza in the past several years. These have included not only the Big Apple Circus but also the Holiday Village that used to be at Jordan Marsh (then Macy's) at Downtown Crossing, and is now residing at one of Jordan's Furniture's suburban locations. These are good events, but relatively few and far between. So...a humble suggestion to the City, which may already be going in this direction...how about a simple, set schedule of extended engagements on City Hall Plaza for temporary uses that encourage people to come and spend some time and even spend some money in the very middle of town? Maybe the Big Apple Circus could be more firmly established as the rite of early spring, while late spring, summer and early fall could feature the existing farmers' market combined with the fledging Boston Public Market, which has been casting around for a home for the last few years, and seems always just a step away, but never quite there? They've most recently been in Dewey Square on two days a week during the summer. Despite the great foot traffic generated by its proximity to South Station and the need for the Greenway to have worthwhile programming, that location is really challenged, surrounded on 3 sides by multi-lane, one-way streets and on the fourth side by a utility building for the Big Dig. They can do better. Bring them to City Hall Plaza for an extended run in the middle of the year, get them to operate on more days, maybe even allow them to put up a temporary structure or two, and we'd really be talking. Once we're at the tail end of the fall harvest and the market is closed down, maybe we could have a temporary fair with rides and the like to lead us into winter. And then, who knows, the plaza hunkers down like the rest of us during the coldest part of the year and waits for the clowns, horses, acrobats, jugglers, Bello, Grandma, and the rest of the circus to come again in March?

RTUF Note: This post was edited after its original publication. - MJL

Blog Post No. 2010-6: Streets and intersections are meaningful public spaces...

...not traffic sewers

Location: The intersection of Belgrade Avenue, Corinth Street, and Robert Street in Roslindale, a.k.a, Eagan Square, a.k.a. Alexander the Great Square (MAP)

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2007

Photos: Clockwise around the intersection, showing the view up Belgrade Avenue back toward the turn at South Street, then the Corinth Street islands, up Belgrade toward Walworth Street, then across and back down Belgrade.

The Story: I said at the end of my last post that this blog has a soft spot for incremental change, and here's an absolutely prime example at the neighborhood scale. We're back again in Roslindale Square, at its southwestern gateway, just after the point at which Robert Street comes under the MBTA Needham Line trestle and meets Belgrade Avenue and Corinth Street. This intersection has a veteran's memorial name of Eagan Square, but there's a second, more recent designation as Alexander the Great Square. That's a nod to the community's still strong Greek presence, as evidenced by Alexander the Great Park, which has a bust of the great man at its center.

Until this intersection took its current form about 3 years ago, it was one of the very worst in the neighborhood, from the perspective of both cars and pedestrians. As a driver, it was hard to know who exactly had the right-of-way and the massive expanse of pavement without much definition left it hard to know exactly where the travel lanes were supposed to be. As a pedestrian, it felt like a free-fire zone: far too wide, with poorly located crosswalks that just left you hanging out there.

The new configuration, shown in the pictures and in my sketch below, is far, far better. The two tiny islands have been widened and extended. The cross-walks are now manageable in length. The main construction material for the islands is brick, with granite curbing. The two largest elements have green space within them. A public art installation is reportedly awaiting Boston Civic Design Commission approval and could be installed this year. The traffic pattern is clear, with well-defined through and turning lanes. The cars now know where to go, and so do the people. Everyone is being paid some attention.

I am embarrassed to say that, even though this is just blocks from my house and we lived here well before the intersection was reconfigured, I have no idea who exactly is responsible for making this happen. Responsibility for the intersection lies with the Boston Transportation Department, so ultimately it had to be their project. But I don't know who in the community advocated for the change. Whoever that person is, they deserve heartfelt thanks. And BTD is to be commended for implementing a design that is a far cry from what has been done to our streets and intersections for too much of the last 60+ years.

Which brings us to the teachable moment portion of this post. It is a sad fact that, on the whole, our country decided in the post-war period to delegate virtually complete control over our streets to traffic engineers whose sole goal was to move more vehicles at higher speeds all the time, everywhere. Streets and travel lanes were widened. Private property was taken to facilitate that widening. Sidewalk widths were reduced or sidewalks totally eliminated. Off-street parking was reduced or banned outright. Pedestrian street crossing times were reduced and vehicle signal phasing increased. And the design of most of what was actually built was wholly unsatisfactory or just plain ugly. In short, far too many streets -- the connective tissue that make up the vast majority of our public realm -- were radically impoverished, turned from places that people could enjoy spending time in to places to be avoided at all costs. In the words of more than one commentator, those streets had simply become "traffic sewers." All of this is to say nothing of the federal interstate construction boom of the 1950s-1970s, that plowed through and gutted too many urban neighborhoods to mention them all by name. Being from Brooklyn, all you have to say to me is "Sunset Park" and I immediately think of the Gowanus Expressway, an elevated highway built in the early 1940s that cut that neighborhood in two and separated it from the water. Perhaps the best piece of writing on the phenomenon of interstate highway construction in urban areas is Robert Caro's chapter on "One Mile" of the Cross-Bronx Expressway in The Power Broker, his seminal biography on Robert Moses. Worth reading again even if you've read the book before.

I am overstating the point slightly here. Not every traffic engineer wanted to pave over paradise or obliterate urban neighborhoods, and not every street was turned into a high-speed nightmare. Plenty of great neighborhood streets, as well as parkways and urban boulevards survived. A lot of that was the result of an active citizenry -- Jane Jacobs being probably the most famous active citizen given her well-publicized fights with Moses over Washington Square Park and the Lower Manhattan Expressway [for an excellent treatment of that dynamic, check out Anthony Flint's Wrestling with Moses, reviewed in the New York Times here] -- that fought the freeway revolt in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some of it was the sheer amount of good urban fabric that our country has been blessed with. There simply wasn't enough time and money while the game was really on to screw up everything. Over the last 20 years, the pendulum has swung strongly back toward treating our streets like valuable, critically important shared spaces. It is no coincidence that form-based coders devote a lot of time and energy to the design of the streets and related open spaces that become the framework for new neighborhoods. If you want to a satisfying built environment, you need to have the streets and the buildings working together. If either component fails to behave, the place you want will not happen. Great strides have been made, to the point where my observation is that resistance to more complete streets often comes from a public distrustful of change in general and of professional traffic engineers, urban designers, and planners in particular, not from those professions themselves. The new Alexander the Great Square shows that the end result is well worth overcoming whatever obstacles are encountered along the way.

RTUF sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: It's a little hard to tell just how much of an improvement the current configuration really lis. There was just way more car-reserved pavement at this intersection than remotely made sense.

RTUF Note: This post has been modified after initial publishing to correct certain typos and grammatical errors and to add photos of the detail of the new traffic islands and of the bust of Alexander the Great that is located in the adjoining park. -- ML