Bluestone to the Rescue!

Every Street Needs a Gimmick

Have a look at the street in the picture above. It's really narrow, and it's surrounded by some pretty high buildings. Philadelphia has a bunch of streets like this. It's an old city. 

I see a lot of potential in these narrow streets with high walls. There's a lot of intrinsic drama here.

Years ago, narrow streets were a thing. Then along came the mania for wide streets - really wide streets - and people stopped paying much attention to the little ones. 

The street above is in the 2300 block of Ludlow, just south of Market and not far from the Market Street bridge. I think a lot of people don't even know it's there. It's easy to miss as you drive by on 23rd street.

Outdoor Rooms

It's not that people don't know about Philly's narrow streets, but I think it's fair to say that the picture which comes immediately to mind is something like Elfreth's Alley - a small residential street flanked by relatively low buildings.

Streets like Elfreth's Alley have the potential to be outdoor rooms. Here's a picture of Smedley street running north from Pine to Spruce. Smedley lies between 16th and 17th.

Not every little residential street looks like this, of course. But some do, and more could.

Most of these streets are lined with small dwellings that are two or three stories tall, and I think the low height of the buildings contributes mightily to the feeling of an outdoor room.

Urbanist Jan Gehl, in his Cities for People (2010), has interesting things to say about how people on a street relate to the buildings that line the street. He notes that humans are designed to look primarily horizontally, and down. Looking up is not so easy for us. We can readily take in the first two or three stories of a building; and we can with more difficulty relate effectively up to about five floors. (See, in particular, pages 39-42, 84.) 

Imagine you're trying to talk to someone leaning out a window. Fairly easy if the person is on the second or third floor; up to five stories you can probably still connect. Higher floors are essentially disconnected from the ground, or, as Gehl puts it on page 42, "Above the fifth floor, offices and housing should logically be the province of the air-traffic control authorities." 

With a three-story building the cornice at the top can signal the ceiling, which of course isn't there. Instead we have a room where the sky stands in for the ceiling.

Narrow Streets, High Walls

Higher walls create something different. I've been calling these narrow streets with high walls concrete canyons (to borrow a term from Manhattan). There are two basic things going on here: First, compression at the street level and, second, an invitation to look up - straight up at a sliver of the sky.

There's an old Latin epigram - per aspera ad astra. Here's a translation: Through difficulties we reach for the stars. 

So the compression on the ground reminds us of the limitations we face in our daily lives. And the sliver of the sky reminds us that we have higher aspirations.

Not a bad lesson for a street to teach. I suppose we could call such a street an open-air cathedral.

Medieval Gothic cathedrals, in particular, work this effect very well. For instance, the cathedral at Chartres in northern France has a nave that is 37 meters tall - about 120 feet. Not too shabby for a building built out of stone. And then there are the stained glass windows, particularly those high up, in the clerestory. 

I suspect that streets like 2300 Ludlow are probably cathedrals of commerce, and I don't expect them to match the effect of Chartres, but the compression at ground level and the invitation to crank our necks back and look straight up are the same.

We have quite a few streets in Philly that pull this off with aplomb. A few years ago I found a happy hunting ground of sorts in Old City, north of Chestnut and west of Second. Here's a picture of Strawberry street, with the Custom House in the background. You will notice the truck, which gives you a good idea of the width of the street, and also the trash bins and a rather pensive man standing in the road. 

These are working streets, with delivery trucks bringing stuff in and trash trucks hauling stuff out. There's even the occasional car.

This block, as you can see, is blessed with quite a number of front facades. However, in many of these little streets, you are looking primarily at the back or the side of buildings. This is definitely true of 2300 Ludlow, but I have some good news. 

The new building going up in the 2300 block of Market will take up the whole block from 23rd to 24th, and extending to Ludlow. However, it will not be demolishing the large building at 23rd street, which has lovely facades on Market, 23rd and Ludlow. It will be incorporated into the new building. So the facades you see below, on 23rd and Ludlow, will remain, along with a similar facade on Market.

The Blank Wall Problem

I think our new open-air cathedral will have a very nice north wall. As for the south wall, I think it's time to say, with the astronauts of Apollo 13, "Houston, we have a problem." 

The building on the south side of the street is primarily a parking garage with some offices, none of which open onto Ludlow. What we have on Ludlow is a blank wall extending from the ground to the sky, punctuated by openings that allow the tailpipe emissions to dissipate.

We have a lot of these blank garage walls in Philadelphia, and they share one thing - they're very boring. There's basically nothing to look at.

It's possible to make them less boring. One option is throw a fabric screen over the whole thing. Then you can illustrate in any way you want. Here is a small-scale screen fronting a construction site on Sansom at 16th.

I'm more partial to paint on masonry, as in the picture below. This garage is at 12th and Walnut.

Not boring. Think of the people in the new building on the north side of Ludlow. The new building will have lots of windows looking out to the garage, and the people inside the building will be glancing out the window occasionally. We don't want them to be bored to death. Perhaps we could even amuse them.

At Ground Level

My main concern, however, is for the people walking by at ground level. What will this canyon feel like to someone on the street?

Remember that we humans spend most of our time looking horizontally, or a little bit down. The walls at the ground floor are therefore crucial to the pedestrian's experience. So how much variety in the ground-floor visual experience do we need?

Jan Gehl says that, on commercial streets, the ideal width for a storefront is around 19 feet. (Gehl visited Philadelphia in 2016 and walked Market Street from Old City to City Hall with Ashley Hahn of WHYY's PlanPhilly. For the resulting story, click here.)

It's easier to meet this goal on a commercial block that has a string of small shops. That's why the shopping areas on Walnut and Chestnut are more successful than the commercial frontages on Market and JFK.  

Not every street is going to be lined by shops, or interesting residential facades, but the pedestrian's need to be amused is a constant, and walkers will tend to walk where they know they will find interesting things to look at. How do we keep people interested when they're walking down a block like 2300 Ludlow?

I don't foresee anyone opening a trendy boutique here. I expect that this will always be mainly a space that people pass through, rather than a place where people linger. But still I think it should be a space that people enjoy passing through, and possibly even remember fondly.

One thing not to do is put up a blank wall. Unfortunately, this seems to be an acceptable solution for at least some architects and developers in Philadelphia today. Here's a nearby wall on a relatively new building that's even blanker than the parking garage. This one is in the 2200 block of Ranstead, barely a stone's throw from 2300 Ludlow. 

Even the decrepit north side of Ludlow is doing better than this. Have a look below.

You may not like this assemblage very much, but I'm a pushover for ramshackle. 

Just as a reminder of the potential that these spaces have, here's a picture of a facade on Bank Street, in Old City.

This of course is an actual building facade, but architects have a whole footlocker full of ornaments that can dress up a blank wall. My favorite is the pilaster, which dates back to ancient Greece. Such ornaments have generally fallen out of favor.

As with the upper floors discussed above, my go-to solution for the Blank Wall Problem at street-level is a mural, which is also an ornament. However, in Philly at least, murals seem to have gained some acceptance, and they do save you from what may be the only alternate solution, which is to completely redesign whatever is behind the blank wall and add some windows and possibly a door or two - in other words, to create an actual facade.

I've given the matter some thought, and I think the dreadfully boring ground-level wall on the south side of 2300 Ludlow needs a mural. Not just any mural. As a street-level mural, it needs a lot of detail, and a lot of different things going on, and, I think, people.  For this particular site, I think the mural should be an imaginary streetscape from around 1900, complete with pushcart vendors and happy merchants standing in the doorways of their shops. Maybe a cat snoozing in a shop window. A few well-behaved dogs, children playing with hoops, perhaps a mother selecting apples from a pushcart while holding her baby in her arm (motherhood could be complicated even then).

A Room with a Floor

Why all this nostalgia? Let's have a look at the third piece of our cathedral - the floor.

On one of my early visits to this block, I noticed that the asphalt pavement was badly deteriorated, and then I noticed, peeking out of the holes in the blacktop, something remarkable: bluestone pavers.

Under the tarmac, it turned out, was a whole city block of old bluestone pavement, suitably mangled by the ravages of time. And I thought to myself: "What a fabulous gimmick!" A bluestone street. I know of only one intact bluestone street in the larger Rittenhouse area. It's in the 1400 block of Waverly, behind Peirce College. Perhaps we could daylight the bluestone in 2300 Ludlow and restore the inevitable defects. Then the area would have two bluestone streets.

Here's a shot of 1400 Waverly.

And here's a close-up of some of the bluestone. You'll note there are a few red bricks, presumably filling in for damaged bluestone.

I think bluestone is gorgeous, providing an attractive and unusual backdrop for the surrounding red walls, and also giving us a little history lesson: Years ago, our city looked very different, often in ways that are now hard to imagine.

If it's not possible to restore the bluestone pavement on 2300 Ludlow, perhaps it would be possible to salvage the viable bluestone at that location and use it to replace some of the red bricks currently being used in the 1400 block of Waverly. I actually like the red bricks, but I would love to see a bluestone street in close to its original state.

________

ALAS, my bluestone proposals have been overtaken by events. This block of Ludlow was recently repaved with asphalt, and the bluestone pavers will sleep again under the asphalt, for a few more years.

See also Second and Chestnut, This Isn't Just Any Alley, Gordon Cullen and the Outdoor Floor, Small Streets Are Like Diamonds,  A Few Deft Touches for Back Streets, Buried Under the Tarmac.