That 70s Urbanism, Part II: Fixing Urban Renewal

On Twitter, Cap'n Transit appreciated my focus on Stamford in the previous post, so to continue on the prior topic with an ongoing focus on the 1970s, I'll return to that city to offer some perspective on the past as well as some ideas for the future.

Best known as an office escape for New York-based banks and other companies, the city actually has a history nearly as old as New York itself and, before urban renewal, had a street pattern as intricate as lower Manhattan's old Dutch footways.  The New York and New Haven railroad cleaved the town in the late 1840s, and in the part south of the tracks polluting factories cropped up along the waterfront and canal.  In the 1950s, Interstate 95 ripped another path through the heart of the city, though partly following the railroad right-of-way.

Stamford's downtown in the midst of renewal, 1979. City of Stamford via Ferguson Library.

Finally, a massive urban renewal project, initiated in the 1950s but only carried out in full in the 1970s, destroyed the bulk of the city's downtown area and resulted in the demapping of many streets, even including the primary stretch of Stamford's Main Street.  These streets were replaced by high-speed "stroads," and the office buildings that replaced the fine-grained fabric of the city took the form of glass and granite monoliths perched over parking lots, serving as fortresses against the miasma presumably thought to be swirling on the near-empty sidewalks.  A large enclosed three-anchor mall was constructed over several blocks of condemned buildings.

Reworking 1970s Urban Renewal

The age of massive urban renewal on the scale that Stamford pursued is over, by and large, some planning projects in Baltimore excepted.  Stamford is unlikely to ever engage in another project of such scope.  As I noted in the previous post, however, a city like Stamford can still use those elements of 1960s and 1970s planning to its advantage if it plays its cards correctly.

The 1970s as I wrote were an early golden age of pedestrian infrastructure as reflected by several key elements which are broadly applicable to today's cause of walkability, although not all are today well-regarded:

• Mass transit (obviously - the 70s witnessing a revival of heavy rail systems)
• Generous use of elevators in public space
• Escalators and moving walkways
• Pedestrian tunnels, skyways and covered sidewalks
• Pedestrianized streets
• Enclosed malls and other shopping areas

In addition to the above, Stamford has in the last 20 years enjoyed a resurgence of the "Euro block" apartment form throughout the downtown area, in addition to an earlier boom in townhouse-over-garage condominium construction.  Although Stamford will not be Barcelona anytime soon, good things can be and should be happening, but the downtown is as car-dominated as ever.  How about a plan for incremental improvement?

The plan I put forward has several components, some inspired by Jane Jacobs, some by Jeff Speck, some by Nathan Lewis and Japanese city planning, and by others too numerous to mention:

1. Extend the enclosed shopping area in the train station
2. Narrow several of the downtown streets by sidewalk widening and use of bike lanes
3. Use eminent domain and existing public land to open several new narrow streets
4. Provide arcaded pedestrian streets where appropriate
5. Open the mall to the street and re-open Main Street
6. Use the under-capacity mall and Target parking lots for long-term parking for downtown residents in lieu of parking requirements

In most cases, new streets are built on existing public land and would require little or no condemnation.  Some simply represent streets which were uprooted and de-mapped during urban renewal.  Most vital to these is the continuation of narrow Summer Street down to the UBS building.  The street narrows to only about 16 feet at its southern extremity, and should be continued at that width further south, ideally as a shared space or even pedestrianized shopping street that will provide a safe and attractive walking path from the train station (a moving walkway probably veers too far into parody/Seinfeld territory).  As a 16' street, it could possibly be arcaded as well.  The street would terminate at the UBS building into an existing pedestrian pathway that leads to the train station.

This image, rotated counterclockwise, shows how the new street would appear lined by Euro block apartments and shops, leading with only a couple of curved turns directly to the train station, which has an existing underpass lined with a few shops passing underneath I-95.  This line of shops would be carried across past I-95 and along the path in front of the UBS building, possibly incorporating an anchor store:

Patching Up the Mall

In the previous post, I showed one way the mall could be opened to the street by demolishing one of the car access ramps:

At present, left, and after new entrance.

Additionally, entrances could be punched into the mall at various other points on the exterior, as most parking is actually above the mall, and shopping can be accessed at most points directly from the street.

Narrowing Other Streets

Atlantic Street, onto which this mall entrance faces, should be narrowed from three to two lanes throughout its length with a bike lane added.  A shared space arrangement with bollards (bollards inside the bike lane) would be an ideal treatment.  A new street of 16' or so (not shown) should be run past the facades of these buildings, through the adjacent park, under the mall and into the remnant stub of the old Main Street.  Half of the overly-large park (really a paved square) should be sold off to private parties to construct new buildings along the southern boundary of this new street, leaving a still-large triangular square bounded on all sides by rights-of-way.  

The city should also use its power of eminent domain to open new streets and to complete those discontinuous fragments that already exist.  The below map shows existing streets in red, pedestrian paths in orange, and suggested new streets in yellow:

These new streets also include a pedestrian bridge over Mill River at the upper left, the new 16' street referenced before curving through the park, a new arcaded street through the mall, and two streets creating a three-part division of a large, partly unbuilt block at the right.  Other segments have been added here and there, and the continuation of Summer Street is visible in the center right.

Transportation

Regarding transportation, despite the likely high cost, it may be desirable to create a second stop in downtown Stamford at either Canal or Elm Streets or along East Main Street.  This would help convert the train system into a small localized rapid transit system, and has parallels elsewhere on the line with New Haven's State Street station, Bridgeport's planned second Barnum station and Fairfield's Metro station.  

A full infill station, complete with station house, was built in West Haven for $80 million, though the Bridgeport's station's cost appears to be nearly double that.  Since Stamford is the last stop for many express trains, it would not unduly interfere with express train operation.  An Elm Street or East Main Street station serving the Cove neighborhood and providing a secondary downtown route might be very popular and would not require much parking.  There is ample room for it, and the existing overpasses dating from the turn of the century, will need to be replaced sooner or later.

Optimistically, a plan like this would have a ten-year time-frame from initiation of planning to start of operation.

Parking

Parking is always one of the thorniest issues in downtown planning, but Stamford, for better or worse, is "blessed" with an abundant supply of garage parking.  In particular, the mall parking lot and the Target parking lot are greatly under-used.  In light of this parking supply, if parking minimums cannot be abolished entirely, the city should offer fee in lieu of parking to any residential developer who secures a parking arrangement with one of these local operators.  The number of spaces required to be secured should be as low as politically feasible.

It goes without saying that on-street parking rates should be dramatically increased in the downtown area.  The city is currently attempting to raise additional revenue by imposing new fees on outdoor dining spaces, yet the parking adjacent to it continues to be greatly underpriced.  Although I am generally opposed to on-street parking in areas with high pedestrian volumes, a Shoup-inspired approach that used increased fees for civic improvements could be a positive change.

What Not to Do

Stamford is currently undergoing a major redevelopment project in the Harbor Point area, a former mixed industrial and residential area in the South End of the city, west of the canal.  Although purportedly the handiwork of planners, the haphazard arrangement of streets and commercial spaces creates an environment which at best, is reasonably pleasant, but which at worst is less than the sum of its parts.  

Here are some examples of the decent, the bad and the ugly.  One of the newest areas features a semi-shared space street (interesting) with use of bollards (good), yet the space is overly large (not good) the architecture is completely cold and indifferent (not good) and the scene is altogether too busy with too many plantings (not good).  There are a couple of restaurants along the street to the left with outdoor seating, which greatly helps to enliven the area in the warmer months.

For contrast, here is a street in between two apartments, lined with garages and electric equipment.  This is an unpleasant and even dangerous street to walk down, and it is right off the main park square!

Most unforgivably, in another area close by, is this facade on the local neighborhood commercial main street.  I generally try to steer away from strong language so that readers may make up their own minds, but this is simply atrocious.  The street level must be done better than this.

There are many other changes large and small that one could consider throughout Stamford as a whole, and the city does seem to be engaged in a process of gradually narrowing intersections by bumping out sidewalks, thereby improving pedestrian safety.  With several recent and well-publicized deaths of pedestrians, this needs to be an immediate focus and priority.  Zoning needs to be reformed as well, but that is a post that I have already written.

Thursday Old Urbanism

A family member back from a Japan adventure was kind enough to oblige my request for photos of street scenes during her travels. Although you can easily get your Japanese narrow streets fix at Nathan Lewis' site, or even on Google Streetview, which now covers most of Japan, I thought I might share of few of them:

Asakusa District, Tokyo

Although many streets are effectively pedestrianized like this one, with little auto traffic, few if any are actually physically closed off to cars. On-street parking is almost nonexistent. Almost all bikes seem to be of the cruiser type at left, with high handlebars, comfy seats and a basket almost invariably attached in the front (and often the back as well). Helmets? Very few if any are worn, apparently.

Kyoto

Arcade-style public shopping streets, running for block after block, are abundant. In Kyoto, it appears a person could walk across much of the downtown area without leaving the shelter of one of these covered streets. Despite the near-total lack of nearby parking, the visual evidence shows that these streets aren't suffering from a dire lack of customers. I expected to find a website devoted to them, but that seems to be a project still in search of a creator.

Shinsaibashi, Osaka

Another very pleasant shopping street, in Osaka.

Exploring "The Greatest Grid"

The new exhibit "The Greatest Grid" at the Museum of the City of New York is well worth a visit for anyone with even a passing interest in urban planning or the history of the city.  An accompanying exhibit of speculative urban designs, however, provides evidence that the heroic materialist ideal has been slow to loosen its grasp over the minds of some practitioners in the fields of architecture and urban planning.

Simeon DeWitt's 1794 plan for Albany:
large blocks and wide streets.

Before featuring a few of these, though, a few words on the main exhibit.  Despite curator Hillary Ballon's evident admiration of New York's grid plan, the exhibit is evenhanded in its presentation, quoting liberally from critics such as Clement Clarke Moore (who famously quipped that the commissioners were "men who would have cut down the seven hills of Rome.")*  Not only the early 19th century era, but the entire subsequent century of growth and change is covered.  The featured historic maps and photos of the city are beautiful and fascinating.

There are also copies of the plans of other cities of the era, including L'Enfant's plan for Washington D.C. and (later commissioner) Simeon DeWitt's 1794 plan for a northern extension of Albany, which shows the same grid of oversized blocks and uniformly wide streets that would reappear a thousand times in the settlements of the following century.  The web of narrow streets and small blocks by the waterfront, a legacy of Dutch administration, was, as in New York, not eradicated, but evidently was not seen as an object of any interest, except as an example of a characteristics to be avoided.

Of particular interest to me were the photos of the shantytown settlements that occupied large parts of Manhattan through the end of the 19th century.  One interesting fact from the exhibit: Jacob Riis, the famous social reformer, opposed the eviction of shantytown inhabitants and the demolition of their dwellings, arguing that the self-built homes of the squatters provided accommodations superior to, and more affordable than, the tenements of the Lower East Side.

The partner exhibit, "The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan", is interesting for somewhat different reasons: not so much for introducing viable design proposals for the city, but for shedding light on the imaginations of contemporarary architects and planners.  The proposals on display seem to draw from three basic sources of inspiration:

• Heroic Materialism. This term, which I'm borrowing from Nathan Lewis (who in turn borrowed it from Kenneth Clark), describes an aesthetic preference for monumental scale and the image, as much as the reality, of technology and engineering prowess.  Nathan dates it to approximately 1780, although it has Baroque antecedents and yet truly came into its own only around 1900, when Western imaginations were already trending toward urban gigantism. It grew in influence in the 1920s and 1930s, with the ideas of Corbusier and other Modernists, and remained the dominant force in theoretical urban thinking at least through the 1960s (the suburban reality on the ground notwithstanding).
• "Green" Urbanism.  Although this line of thinking was anticipated by the Broadacre City of Frank Lloyd Wright and the garden city movement, the current incarnation emphasizes an integration of natural forms, and especially agriculture, into urban areas, as well as sustainable building practices, without necessarily disparaging density.  Still, there is a degree of overlap with heroic materialism: "green" practices often rely on high-tech, rather than traditional technologies, while the tower-in-the-park form advocated by the Modernists, heroic materialist in scale, also reflects garden city influences.  Green projects can also be incremental, as below, but share a distinct focus that differentiates them.
• Incremental Urbanism. Only two of the eight featured projects reflected this approach, which seeks to make more modest and gradual changes to the urban fabric, observing the city as it stands, reinforcing those qualities already found to be beneficial while addressing perceived shortcomings.  It is by far the most "Jacobsian" of the three, but also the least flashy, and least likely to lend itself to dramatic illustrations or other flights of visual fancy.

On to the exhibits:

Heroic Materialism: At left, giant skyscrapers dwarf the Empire State Building in a plan that called for zoning limits to be rescinded for all lots facing on north-south avenues (and presumed that developers would respond with towers obviously inspired by the Emerald City). At right is an architect's idea of some vast megastructure looming over the northern end of Central Park, with father and young son enjoying the park underneath projecting towers.

What about building 40-story towers on landfill sunk into the 50-foot deep waters of the Hudson river?  Cruise ships thread channels between buildings.

From a Green Urbanism perspective, why not tear up 71st street and replant it with wheat?  At least the streets would be car-free under this proposal, and the view is human-scaled and at street level.  More fundamentally, this proposal does recognize that the vast amount of Manhattan given over to wide surface streets represents a greatly under-exploited urban resource.

Tesselated housing in the sky -- they can't be serious, right?

Finally, 6 1/4 Avenue, by Ksestudio, which proposes opening a new 40-foot wide street between and parallel to 6th and 7th Avenues that, according to the designers, "activates the depth of the base of the New York tower by multiplying the public perimeter of the block."  Simple and elegant, simultaneously addressing the excessive width of the midtown blocks and the lack of additional north-south routes while greatly adding to the amount of accessible street frontage.  Feasible?  Maybe, maybe not, but the method is thoughtfully incremental.  No flashy graphics were included, just clear and concise figure-ground drawings.

That's all I have for 2011. See you in the new year!

*Stephen Smith has recently covered some other critiques of the plan here.

Thursday Old Urbanism: Western Hemisphere Edition

On a gray November afternoon for those of us in the northeastern United States, a few colorful images from New World cities of non-Anglophone origin:

Buenos Aires

Flickr/Pedro Angelini

Campeche

Flickr/H. Silenus

Rio De Janeiro (favela)

Flickr/Robert Blackie

Havana

Flickr/Inkognitoh

Paraty

Flickr/markybon

Quebec City

Flickr/SoStark

Queretaro

Flickr/Jartweb

Sucre

Flickr/b00nj

Willemstad

Flickr/MLukesh

Quito

Flickr/ximenacab

Last Look At Seaside

After reading Bruce Richards' comment on the previous Seaside post,  I returned to the town on my last day in Florida and took a closer look at some of the "Krier lanes," the narrow footpaths running behind and between the houses of Seaside which apparently double as utility easements.  Only by walking these paths can one appreciate some of the more subtle design decisions made by the town planners.

What I found interesting to note is not only the frequency of accessory houses, but the presence of four lots (in the center of the image at right, although there are several others in the town) of typical Seaside dimensions of 50'x100' which have each been subdivided into two 50'x50' lots, a size very close to that which Nathan Lewis has suggested for a dense neighborhood of single-family detached homes. 

The only access to these lots, as with the accessory houses, is by the lanes.  Despite the small size of the lots, the houses are quite ample:

The house to the left in the top photo is, I believe, this one, a 1,400 square foot house with 550 square feet of porch space.  The address is given as Savannah Street, one of the wide, brick-paved streets, yet the only direct access is by the paths. 

A city of residential lots of this average size, using a distance between houses the same as that in the lower photo (about 16') for rights-of-way, and with short and narrow blocks of 300'x100', would attain a density of over 9,100 units/square mile, or, using the American average of 2.59 persons per household, around 24,000 people per square mile.  A few wider streets would be needed at intervals, but they should not alter this outcome greatly.  A real life example is Nathan Lewis' own Tokyo suburb of Seijo, which he's used to familiarize us with the neglected area of Japanese urbanism:

The Seijo street view, with a remarkably Seaside-like house on the left:

Or, at right, consider an entire neighborhood built along these lines.  This is a development at the fringes of Tokyo -- just a bit further west steep mountains quickly rise up.  It also happens to be about 70 acres, very close to Seaside's 80.  Even the street network is vaguely similar, yet density is about 25% higher.  It's not necessarily a model to be copied, but it does show what could be accomplished using the basic 50'x50' lot that Seaside pioneered along with 16' streets.  To densify further, while retaining a single-family detached form, subtract half or so of the 50'x50' lots and replace them with the "accessory dwellings" that are abundant at Seaside, and which, under separate ownership, can fit on their own 20'x25' lots:

These cottages offer around 500-800 square feet, not much different from the "micro homes" currently being built in Portland that commenter Vince has mentioned. 

The promise offered by these common sense innovations at Seaside unfortunately has not carried over into most New Urbanist developments.  At Kentlands, for instance, although many individual houses can fit within a 50'x50' lot, a rear yard of equal size has typically been reserved for a detached garage, an issue I've talked about before.  But the lessons of Seaside are there for anyone willing to look a little closer at the remarkable planning that went into it.

For more on these issues, I strongly recommend reading Nathan Lewis' site if you haven't discovered it already:

• How To Make a Pile of Dough with the Traditional City 5: The New New Suburbanism
• How To Make A Pile of Dough With the Traditional City 4: More SFDR/SFAR Solutions
• How to Make a Pile of Dough with the Traditional City 3: Single Family Detached in the Traditional City Style

Yours truly enjoying a beverage and a good book in Seaside
after a day exploring the town.

The Successor: Rosemary Beach

 Throughout the week, I'll be making the most of a trip to the Florida coast to post on several of the New Urbanist towns and developments in the area from an 'Old Urbanist' perspective. Today's piece examines Rosemary Beach.

Rosemary Beach's origin dates to 1995, a time when the New Urbanism was in rapid ascendance.  The Congress for the New Urbanism had been formed two years before, Seaside and Kentlands had already enjoyed great success, and as real estate began to enter its 10-year boom period work was abundant.  Given the chance to design another coastal Florida town, DPZ might have simply copied Seaside's successful formula, but as the designers themselves explain, they chose not to:     

"Fifteen years after the design of Seaside, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company was given the opportunity to return to the Florida Panhandle to create another new neighborhood on Scenic Highway 30-A. A New York-based investment firm had purchased a 52-acre property just seven miles east of Seaside, hoping to reproduce that project’s success. Given this objective, the clear mandate was to differ from that earlier model as little as possible. However, the opportunity to revisit the concept of the coastal resort town after fifteen years of experience allowed the design team to apply techniques that distinguish Rosemary Beach from Seaside in several fundamental ways. ...

Since most residents of Seaside use their cars rarely, the plan of Rosemary Beach introduces a rear alley system so that cars can be parked in garages that are not visible from the street. About half of these garages are topped by granny flats, small apartments that can be rented out to help finance the construction of the main house. The presence of alleys also means that not every house needs street access at the front, allowing many of the smaller streets to be replaced by boardwalks. The wooden boardwalks, inspired by northern seaside towns like Fire Island, allow direct pedestrian to access the beach and bring the beach experience deep into the plan. Two public squares on the southern boundary further focus the neighborhood’s activity on the ocean."

So right away we have a fundamental reconfiguration of the street network -- or do we?  In fact, both Seaside and Rosemary Beach share the same pattern of having a paved street on one side of homes, and a pedestrian path on the other, as can be seen by comparing the photos below with those from Tuesday's post:

"Back" and ...

... "Front."

So perhaps no "alley" has been introduced after all. Only the names have been changed.  The logic of the decision to add garages is a bit obscure: because cars are used rarely, does it follow that large and expensive garages should be built to accommodate them?

The garage-facing side with its 30-foot wide flush road surface and lack of green space presents a far more traditional urban appearance than the side that has now been designated the front, yet the designer does not appear to consider this a virtue, noting approvingly that the garages "are not visible from the street," in spite of the fact that we've just been told that in many cases there are no streets, only boardwalks.  Still, the arrival of the garages has, intentionally or not, created a traditionalist feel distinctively different from that of Seaside along certain of the so-called alleys, albeit one which depends heavily on the existence of homes above the garage to enliven and humanize the space.

The suggestion that the boardwalks were inspired by Fire Island is intriguing.  Let's take a quick look at Fire Island's plan:

Do you notice anything unusual here?  Access to Fire Island homes is only by boardwalks and pedestrian paths for a very simple reason, as the Fire Island website explains:

"There are no paved roads on Fire Island and only service and emergency vehicles are allowed on the island. Free of cars, traffic, pollution, and noise Fire Island offers a peaceful getaway unlike any other vacation destination. ... Walking, biking, and golf-carting are the modes of transportation and help to preserve our island’s natural beauty."

Here is a Fire Island "street," "alley," call it what you will:

Flickr/Joe Shlabotnik

Now, like Rosemary Beach and Seaside, Fire Island is largely a vacation getaway, but one which accommodates over four thousand housing units containing a summer population in the tens of thousands, all without cars!  Could that be a viable planning model?  The design statement for Rosemary Beach shows, I think, the ambiguous role of cars in New Urbanist projects.  It is understood that cars are not an asset to the development and the feel of the community, yet they are guiding fundamental design choices.  The mode of accommodation changes, but this unresolved design tension persists.  The car-free option remains unexplored despite its obvious viability in the context of vacation destinations.

Moving on: here is the main commercial corridor of Rosemary Beach:

The architecture is of an outstanding quality, even exceeding the standard set at Seaside.  Each building shows a meticulous attention to detail and proportion in every part, and in its relationship to its neighbors (complaints about New Urbanist developments such as these often point to the alleged "fakeness" of the architecture, as though use of historicist elements and detail were somehow insincere.  I reject these arguments completely -- architectural beauty is not only a legitimate but highly important end, no matter how or through use of what styles it might be achieved).  There is a wonderful lack of large surface lots or garage parking -- a tremendous improvement over almost any other development in the surrounding area.  Notice again, though, two features of the design that have been seen before in Seaside: an excessive width of the street, and a reappearance of Christopher Alexander's "subtle mechanical character" in that the street, although angled NE/SW in defiance of a strict orthogonal plan, is perfectly straight, and of a regular width along its length.

The streets of Rosemary Beach do bend a bit more than those in Seaside, however.  The overall plan has a pleasing asymmetry, yet the surveyor's aesthetic is still evident here.  The 19th century pattern of large-scale, attached commercial buildings and detached single family homes persists, although in an extraordinary architectural form that is a delight to explore and take in.

A final point concerns the drastic difference in the way Rosemary Beach and Seaside incorporate Highway 30A (which both towns span) into their designs.  At Seaside, establishments are set back only 15-20 feet from 30A, which, despite its name, is only a 22-foot wide roadway with no shoulders.  Seaside does not shy away from this road, but encroaches upon it and tames it, inducing drivers to slow naturally in response to pedestrian activity.  Rosemary Beach, on the other hand, drops everything and runs away:

At the right hand side is the 22-foot wide 30A, appearing wider due to gigantic turning areas.  Grass buffers extend for 20 feet on either side, followed by ten-foot bike paths, and then another 35 feet of grass for a grand total of 150 feet of sun-baked open ground between buildings at the narrowest point.  On either side, the grassy buffers widen, creating a yawning gap of over 200 feet.  There is no shade at the crosswalk.  At high noon, the feel is of a no man's land, and I saw very few people bold enough to attempt this crossing on foot.

Why Rosemary Beach chose to abandon Seaside's approach and turned its back on this humble state road as though it were the Cross Bronx Expressway, I don't know.  But it need not remain that way -- a solution is as easy as constructing additional homes and shops to link the existing areas north and south of the road.

Overall, Rosemary Beach feels like a place torn in two directions: between a traditionalist European village and a 19th century American resort town with its boardwalks and scrub plants, and between excluding and indulging the automobile.  The clash produces an interesting, if not entirely harmonious, result.  In terms of creating a consistent style and successfully integrating the automobile, Seaside comes out on top -- which is not so much a critique of Rosemary as a compliment of Seaside.

In the next post I'll take a look at the third and latest of DPZ's towns along the coastline -- Alys Beach.

Exploring Seaside

[Updated 8/17, 10:00 p.m.] Throughout the week, I'll be making the most of a trip to the Florida coast to post on several of the New Urbanist towns and developments in the area from an 'Old Urbanist' perspective. Today's piece examines Seaside, FL.

For a person with New Urbanist (or Old Urbanist) leanings, a visit to Seaside feels a bit like a pilgrimage to a sacred site.  Although the merits of the town have been debated for years, its significance in the history of American urban planning is undeniable.  As one of the earliest steps in the evolution of the New Urbanism, which wouldn't formally arrive until more than a decade after the town's 1981 founding, Seaside is an intriguing glimpse into the origins of the movement.  For me, it was a chance to examine the planning decisions made at this early juncture, including those that were repeated in later New Urbanist developments, and those which, for various reasons, largely fizzled out.

First, though, the intentions of the designers, in their own words:

"Seaside is widely acclaimed, financially successful, and almost completely built-out. It has become a symbol of the New Urbanism, exemplifying the movement’s underlying principles, which can be applied to all urban conditions: the built environment must be diverse in use and population; it must be scaled for the pedestrian yet capable of accommodating the automobile and mass transit; and it must have a well defined public realm supported by an architecture that reflects the ecology and culture of the region."

On the count of architecture, the assessment of a 2002 New York Times article that "the best part of Seaside is the houses" is not too far off the mark, though the planning achievements are ultimately more noteworthy.  The tastefulness, elegance and attention to detail in many of the homes  is astonishing. The achievement of creating (and encoding) a regional vernacular which is capable of endless varied repetition is truly remarkable. Notably, the style appears to have carried over into the local building industry, as "Seaside-style" homes are cropping up far north and south of Seaside itself.   

Urbanism is distinct from architecture, however.  On that count, does Seaside deliver on its promise of an environment "scaled for the pedestrian yet capable of accommodating the automobile"?  Let's look at a typical Seaside street:

From white picket fence to white picket fence, the street spans 40 feet (a 20 foot roadway, plus two 10-foot parking lanes).  Homes are set back another ten feet or so, making for a total distance between facing buildings of around 60 feet.  Thanks to attractive paving and extremely light traffic, the street is not hostile to pedestrians, but this is clearly an environment scaled for the automobile.  Cars were observed driving at high speeds through the neighborhood, a problem which has been addressed by marking intersections with all-way stop signs. Yet this decision actually seems to be aggravating the problem of speeding.  I witnessed several drivers roaring up to stop signs, coming to rolling stops, then gunning the accelerator in frustration.  That Seaside has lately been overrun by cars has not escaped notice.

Interestingly, Seaside for the most part has no rear alleys.  This New Urbanist calling card is present only in the newest areas of the town. On the above street, parking spaces are tastefully integrated alongside the single family homes – a far more economical solution than rear parking garages, but one which is undermined by the addition of the two additional parking lanes along the brick roadway.  Do vacation homes really need three parking spaces each?  This in excess of most municipal standards for single-family homes, which generally require no more than two spaces.

In the area along the beach south of Highway 30A, however, a handful of really narrow streets do appear, and these are some of the most beautiful and memorable parts of the town.

This lane is so narrow that even biking feels inappropriate and intrusive – an excellent indicator of intrinsically pedestrian-centric design.  The sand-and-gravel surface physically impedes bikes as well.  Although lanes like this feature only in the small area south of 30A, an extensive series of extremely narrow paths, invisible in any aerial view, run in place of where rear alleys might otherwise appear through most other blocks:

 

These paths, apparently introduced at the suggestion of Léon Krier (whose Classicist architectural fingerprints are evident everywhere you look), run in between rear property lines in most blocks.  The scale is delightfully human-centric and fine-grained.  The paths are not really functionally necessary, but instead seem to be a foil to the wide streets, a means of providing an additional layer of connectivity that offers the same thrill of unexpected discovery that accompanies the very narrow traditional urban lane, a thrill that the wider streets do not offer.  Notably, though, this is not a design feature that has reappeared in most other New Urbanist developments.  By no later than 1992, the New Urbanist pendulum had swung in favor of rear alleys, and the front parking pads and footpaths largely gave way to the detached rear garage, as at Kentlands, although pedestrian paths continued to appear in a much-reduced role.

 The commercial portion of the town reflects an eclectic mix of influences.  A sloping, semi-circular grassy amphitheater, in scale and form reminiscent of the Piazza del Campo, occupies the center.  A lack of shade or any real seating area leaves this important civic space a sun-baked void from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on hot summer days (perhaps an unfair critique, as the same goes for many an Italian piazza, too, except the Florida panhandle has not yet embraced the concept of the afternoon siesta).  The space is so vast, meanwhile, that even four-story buildings around the perimeter fail to define it. 

The area behind this first row of buildings feels somewhat neglected, with over-scaled buildings, wide streets and little attention to detail.  Few people are out and about  in this area.  Much more interesting, again, is the area along the beach, which has a densely-packed cluster of one and two-story restaurants and shops with pedestrian paths running through and between them.  One gets the sense that there really are two Seasides: the traditionalist village south of 30A, with its pedestrian paths and human-scaled buildings, and the vaguely 19th century lookalike north of the road.


[8/17 update: After returning to Seaside at 9:00 p.m., I'm more confident about my earlier observations of the area.  At that time of day, activity is heavily concentrated around the beach-side restaurant and retail area.  In recognition of this, the town has introduced numerous mini-trailer eating establishments (presumably seasonal) along the southern perimeter of the amphitheater, facing across 30A toward the small-scale shops and eateries on the other side of the road.  Even at midday they are running a steady business (see below):]

The exception is a beautiful square framed by Seaside's handful of townhouses -- the feel is part Charleston, part French Quarter:

As to the big picture issues of street layout and population density, a few words from Christopher Alexander, who is generally very positive about Seaside:

"First off, there is a humane environment, pleasant, avoiding many of the mishaps and ugliness of modern American development. It has charm. It has some atmosphere. ... In order to achieve this very large, and humane effect [at Seaside], Andrés [Duany] has used what is a partly mechanical method. He has therefore been forced, in this first round of experiments ... to make a somewhat mechanical version of the ideal.

It is the nature of this 'mechanical' aspect which has to be examined carefully.

In essence it consists of making a rigid framework, and allowing, then considerable individual variation within it. But the carcase, the street grid, is rigid: it does not arise from the give and take of real events. In this regard it is unlike an organic community. It is as if one were to have a rigid mechanical skeleton and hang variational flesh on it. That is not the same as making a coherent whole, in which the public space arises organically from detailed, and subtle adaptations to terrain, human idiosyncracy, individual trees, accidental paths, and so on. ...

The subtle mechanical character which underlies the production of the street grid, is visible, though, in a more disturbing quality. Occasionally one hears that there is something 'unreal' about Seaside. Some of it is carping. Perhaps jealousy. But there is something about this comment that is real, and which goes to the very root of our current inability to make living space in towns."

The street layout at Seaside melds together a concentric ringed pattern with a typical 19th century grid of blocks generally 200' wide and 400' long.  The influence of John Nolen, and in particular his plan for Venice, is evident.  Yet, unlike in Nolen's plan, the individual street segments are resolutely straight, refusing to bend or meander (with a handful of exceptions).  The block lengths, too, are of predictable dimensions.  I think this is the "subtle mechanical character" which Alexander is referring to.

A perfectly straight street, after all, tells us no more than: "A planner drew me with a T-square, and a surveyor marked me out."  We intuitively sense this, since the march of human feet over ground will almost never proceed in a perfectly straight line.  Is it more efficient than a street which emerges from "detailed and subtle adaptations to terrain"?  Not necessarily – it may be less responsive to topography and may require more grading, as was the case with the grids of New York or San Francisco.  The perfectly straight street itself is a mechanical, or utilitarian aesthetic (to borrow Nathan Lewis' terminology), the aesthetic of the professional surveyor whose instruments are designed to mark straight lines and right angles, whether with the ancient groma or the modern laser theodolite.

The grid appears a preferred alternative to the modern suburban streets which meander purely for aesthetic effect, as did the early suburban plans such as Riverside, and in a true utilitarian sense that is probably correct, as the grid provides better connectivity and is easier to navigate.  But in comparison to an organic plan, especially in a town of small size, the advantages as against the process Alexander describes may be less clear. 

In terms of density, Seaside's use of single-family homes on small lots with modest setbacks and small backyards (and with very few grass lawns in evidence) is a separate achievement in and of itself.  Although the houses are large and gracious, densities of about 6 units/acre are achieved.  Backyards are considerably smaller than in the typical 19th century streetcar suburb.  Overall, Seaside's density, in high season, appears to rise to as high as 12-14,000 people per square mile.  This seems to be only slightly less than at Kentlands, despite Kentlands' much greater use of attached housing, perhaps due in part to the presence of space-devouring alleys in the Maryland development.

Overall, despite the critiques I've included here, I found Seaside to be more impressive than I had expected.  The architectural achievement alone is inspiring, and one's hat has to go off to Duany and other architects who, during a nadir in design in the late 1970s and early 1980s, recreated so much beauty in the built environment.  The town continues to improve and refine itself with infill and new design ideas.  The area south of 30A, meanwhile, hints at a genuine traditionalist approach to urbanism.  It is not an approach that has characterized most subsequent New Urbanist developments, however. 

For the next installment in this series, I'll look at Seaside's successor: Rosemary Beach.

The architecture book selection at the Seaside bookstore.

In response to Joseph's comment, the above photo is of Thyme Street, two blocks over from where Seaside officially begins, looking toward Highway 30A.  This is characteristic of many of the residential lanes leading off 30A.  The sand-and-gravel surface is about 16 feet across, and traffic naturally proceeds at 10-15 mph.  Setbacks are much greater than at Seaside, however, with the result that houses are about the same distance apart.