Small Streets Are Like Diamonds

It Depends on How You Look at Them

1500 block of Moravian.

Temple alumni may be familiar with the Acres of Diamonds story, which the university's founder and first president, Russell Conwell, included in a speech that he delivered 6,152 times, by his own reckoning. (In the days before the Internet, you got the word out by traveling around and giving speeches.)

The story concerns a farmer in the middle east (Conwell was well-traveled). One day the farmer was giving his camel a drink at a small brook that ran through the farm, and he noticed an unusual black stone that reflected light in interesting ways. He picked the stone up and took it home and put it on his mantel and forgot about it. A while later a visitor noticed the rock on the mantel, looked at it closely, and announced it was a diamond.

The basic moral of the story is that you should look for riches close to home, and not be put off if the opportunity comes dressed in rags.

Enter Philadelphia's alleys, one of the city's greatest and most neglected resources. Some of them sparkle today, but others are diamonds in the rough, needing a bit of polishing.

2000 block of Panama. Acres of diamonds.

3 Key Functions
People will immediately object that the sparkling alleys tend to be residential, and the grimy ones are usually service alleys, where people stow cars and stash trash. What, these people will ask, is the point of trying to put Cinderella into a party dress?

In both residential and commercial areas, our alleys perform important functions, but often they don't perform them well. When this happens, the culprits are normally our old friends neglect and mismanagement.

Templates exist for better handling of trash and car parking. What seems to be lacking is any political will to address these issues. (For more on ways to improve trash management, click here. For a brief primer on improving our approach to parking, click here.)

There is a third issue where alleys could do a lot more. They are simply not pulling their weight when it comes to deliveries. Our larger streets suffer a lot of congestion from delivery trucks that stop and unload in traffic lanes. If we used our alleys better, they could significantly reduce the stress on our high-traffic streets. (For more on delivery management, click here.)

2000 block of Addison. The garage is going away.

Another Use - Walking
But let's face it. The people who like ugly cities are going to come back and say, well these alleys can perform all three of these functions without being neat and tidy. And we're a poor city, so really what's the problem with a coating of oily muck, strewn remnants of dinner from an expensive restaurant, perhaps a dead rat the size of a small dog, squished by something he didn't see coming.

Well, here's my answer. We're going to need the space. Perhaps we don't need it today, but we will need it very soon. As the population in Center City increases, and the number of people walking increases, our current supply of pleasant sidewalks is going to be swamped.

I don't see us widening the sidewalks on Walnut Street anytime soon, so maybe it's time to look at Moravian, the little alley between Sansom and Walnut. Why, for instance, is the 1700 block of Moravian such a no man's land? It's directly between two of the premier shopping blocks in Center City.

1700 block of Delancey. This wall no longer looks like this.

Form: Human Scale
And why do I think people will be willing to walk down these streets? Many people tend to avoid them today. After all, some are quite disgusting, and most of the others have very little traffic, so folks may not feel particularly safe.

But these streets are intrinsically attractive to humans because they are of a human scale. In a good one - say the 1800 block of Addison - people feel at home in a way that they will never feel at home in a traffic sewer like Market Street. It's their size.

Add people - the residents of 1800 Addison are frequently sitting on their stoops, watching their children play, and that attracts others who are simply passing through and don't mind walking on a street that has almost no cars and actually feels a lot like an outdoor room - and all of a sudden you have a street that is alive.

2200 block of Rittenhouse Square Street.

Nostalgia for Wide Streets
I detect, in various quarters, a certain nostalgia for the good old days - say the 1950's - when Interstates were new and perfectly good neighborhoods were destroyed to make room for ever-wider streets and ever-wider lanes on those streets to accommodate ever more and ever bigger cars. I hear it from transportation engineers who probably know better, and from politicians who probably don't.

Let's set aside the obvious failures like Roosevelt Boulevard and its carnival of death, and look instead at Philadelphia's nicest big street, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, which runs from City Hall out to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Along the way, in the middle, is Logan Square. It's breathtaking at night. Go into the center, by the fountain, and look down to City Hall and up to the Art Museum, and around the square at the Free Library, the Barnes, the Franklin Institute. A bit of a challenge to get out into the middle of the square, by the fountain, but worth it. This is a beautiful street. All it lacks are people.

Well, most of the time. Occasionally, the people take the street over from the many, many cars, and instead of a carnival of death we have a festival of life. I've run several Philadelphia marathons, and the stretch down the Ben Franklin Parkway at the start never failed to thrill me as I and a few thousand fellow runners elbowed our way along toward City Hall.

The Parkway really comes into its own when the people own the space. Most of the time, though, this street has about as many pedestrians as North Dakota.

Sydenham just south of Walnut.

Maybe Streets Are for People
It comes back to this: If you want lively street life, build your streets for people. Everything should align to that goal. Then you will be headed toward a city of the future - not one mired in the mud of the past.

1900 block of Panama. A little alley between two houses.

See also Alleys, My New Favorite Alley, This Isn't Just Any Alley, A Tale of Three Alleys, Putting Some Park into Old Parking Lots, City Beautiful Sprouts on Cypress Street, Unblocking the Bus Lane on Chestnut.