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.

City Beautiful Sprouts on Cypress Street

2017.

If the Center City Residents' Association were to give out a prize for most improved street, I would nominate the 2400 block of Cypress for the 2017 award. Last year I wrote a story about this block and the neighboring blocks of Delancey and Panama. The other two are in great shape; I think they're among the nicest blocks in Philadelphia. The trick is they're being treated as small streets while poor Cypress is being treated as a service alley. Which it is. This is the land of the garage doors.

But people do live here, and many of them would like Cypress to look nicer. So a group of neighbors on the south side decided to go for color, painting their respectably white facades a variety of very nice colors. Also adding a few shutters. And a potted plant or two.

2106. Note the houses on the left, before they were painted.

All of a sudden the street has come alive.

There are further opportunities for improvement.

Let's take the north side of the street first. It's a respectable row of garage doors (see the shot from 2016 above). The problem is that the doors aren't tall enough to provide a sense of enclosure, and the street space dribbles out over the parking pads and back yards, bleeds over the back facades of the buildings to the north and basically evaporates into the sky. Not what you want in a cozy little urban street.

I don't think we need to put false-front second floors on these garage doors, but we need to do something to arrest the eye. Perhaps the suggestion of a screen - you could string LED lights above the doors. That might work.

Or maybe you just need to fill the space with some trees. Here's what things look like on the 2100 block of Cypress. You'll notice the rear facades of the buildings almost vanish in the presence of these trees.

Trees take a while, of course. A good reason to get started soon.

2100 Cypress.

I don't have any other ideas, but I expect an architect could come up with a few. Maybe a class at an architecture school would like to take this block on as a project.

Finally, a tough nut - the street itself. The City should repave the street and restore the sidewalks, not because I think people will walk on them but because the sidewalks will provide visual definition to the street. If a city street and its flanking buildings are an outdoor room, the floor is a critical organizing element. (See Gordon Cullen and the Outdoor Floor.)

I understand that this is a low-traffic street, and I also know that the City currently lacks the money, the equipment, and the trained workforce to mount an adequate repaving program for our streets. However, efforts are under way to change that situation.

And if some daylight does open up, I think this block should be on people's minds. It is certainly one of our more ramshackle streets, and it is right next to the Schuylkill River Park, which has seen large amounts of public and private investment in recent years.

This area is a gem, and the 2400 block of Cypress may be the only remaining flaw.

The residents of this street can paint, and string LED lights, and plant trees, but they can't repave the street. Only the City can do that.

Here's another thing that only the City can do (at least legally) - tow away this derelict car at the corner of 25th and Cypress. A resident of the street asked me to mention it. The car has apparently been there for months. Recently it sprouted a ticket from our friends at the Philadelphia Parking Authority. The ticket is dated October 16. There have been many contacts with various City departments, but so far no tow truck. I'd say the thing is inoperable and abandoned, but of course that is just my layman's opinion.

Let's not end this story on that note. It's too much of a downer.

Let's have a look at what's behind one of those garage doors on the north side.

As I said, people live here. They're doing what is within their power to do. The City, in my opinion, should do its bit.

(See also Alleys, A Tale of Three Alleys, This Isn't Just Any Alley.)

Gordon Cullen and the Outdoor Floor

Oceans of asphalt: 2400 block of Cypress.

My friend Bill Marston loaned me a book called The Concise Townscape, by Gordon Cullen. We had been looking at some of the illustrations over coffee, and I had expressed an interest in reading the text.

I was intrigued by the thought that I might have read this book, or parts of it, more than forty years ago. I wasn't sure until page 82, when I ran across this phrase: "... today the tree is more usually accepted in its own right as a living organism which is pleased to dwell among us." Some things you never forget.

The book has quite a few well-turned aphorisms. Here's another, from page 46: "The typical town is not a pattern of streets but a sequence of spaces created by buildings."

It turns out that Gordon Cullen was quite influential in his day. Many young architects interested in urban design studied his book. I called up my brother and asked him if he recalled Gordon Cullen. The answer was an immediate yes, along with the news that he still has his copy of the book on a bookshelf in his apartment.

Think of Cullen as the English Jane Jacobs - their careers were contemporary, involved magazine journalism, and centered on the harm that automobiles were doing to cities.

Asphalt Is Boring
I was particularly taken with Cullen's thoughts on treatments for the street surface - what he calls "the floor." Here's what he has to say on page 53: "Buildings, rich in texture and color, stand on the floor. If the floor is a smooth and flat expanse of greyish tarmac then the buildings will remain separate because the floor fails to intrigue the eye in the same way that the buildings do."

He comes back to this idea on page 121: "Instead of walls and floor being in harmony, the floor linking or separating architectural elements and expressing the kind of space which exists between buildings, it is as though the buildings were models plonked down on a blackboard."

And here he is on page 128: "From the visual standpoint the greatest single loss suffered is neutralization of the floor, the space between buildings, which has changed from a connecting surface to a dividing surface. ...  Buildings are gathered together but they do not form towns; one might almost as well build houses facing across a railway line."

I recently posted a story on The Pavements of Asbury Park. I wonder if my interest in the visual effect of paving treatments stems from some long-forgotten passages in a dimly remembered book.

What an Illustrator!
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Cullen's illustrations, which manage to be both highly informative and utterly charming. They put me in mind of David Macaulay and his many books. I stumbled across this wonderful TED Talk that Macaulay did a while ago. I haven't found anything comparable for Cullen, so I thought I'd share. You can find some of Cullen's illustrations online, but I think the best way to see his work is to get your hands on the book.

I'm thinking a sidewalk would help.

See also A Tale of Three Alleys.