around hillard street

While returning to the site today to retake some photos for our site study collage, I drove around the Sweet Auburn area that’s just north of our site. Hillard Street in particular had some really great views of the city’s skyline, being almost exactly perpendicular of the Peachtree ridge. So I wove my way through the one-way grid, trying to get the perfect angle for a photograph. The area is perfectly sited for these grand views, and yet the area is economically depressed.

However, there are a few projects slated for the neighborhood. Several plan to be financed by the Eastside TAD, which plans to provide funding to reconnect the Sweet Auburn neighborhood with the area around the new Georgia Aquarium, hopefully improving its economic impact and improving the long-standing neighborhoods around Sweet Auburn. Notably, the Grant Park neighborhood association has a redevelopment plan for the MLK Marta parking lot. And the notorious public housing project, Grady Homes, has been demolished to make way for a mixed-income, HOPE VI community. It’s a really gorgeous area of Atlanta, with a lot of potential, sitting on one of the highest elevation points in the city. Its a shame it’s currently being under utilized.

The other thing that really struck me, was the enormous presence of I-75/85 there. It’s elevated, approximately two stories above ground level, and the void it creates under its immense road width is incredible. The structure is so stoic and regularized, yet there were people walking all through it, talking, buying-selling, and just getting out of the heat. It’s being used right now as a for profit parking lot, but with all that foot traffic, I could easily see it being changed into a temporary market of some kind. Something that would gently weave around the enormous columns of the highway support structure to reconnect the pedestrian oriented retail on either side of the split.

 

three of my favorite things

In our first full day in Chicago, two things really struck me, actually maybe three. One major one was the incredible level of density of this city. Everything is vertical, residential single family, gas stations, restaurants, even churches look like skyscrapers. The streets are kept clean and clutter free through the highly effective use of side alleys. All the power lines, dump trucks, trash cans, and service delivery vehicles are kept off the tree-lined, pedestrian streets and into their appropriate alley way. It’s really a great system, established within the first platting of Chicago. I’m just glad they kept it up to date all these years. And I love the way they add an industrial sensibility and create such a raw way to access the innerworkings of this city.

Two was the “el”, short for elevated train. It wiggles through the city like floating sphagetti, only much much louder. The tracks are all built out of rotting wood and rusting steel and when a train passes overhead, its so loud I sometimes hold my ears. The earth seriously shakes. According to our tour guide, most of the tracks were completed by 1897. That makes them around 110 years old. That is seriously old. Some lines are under renovation, like the brown line, which is the one that Nick uses to get downtown, so we have to jump trains a few times to get where we’re headed.

The third, and my favorite thing that struck me about Chicago was the bean. Its soo gorgeous and larger than expected. Photos really don’t capture the incredible 3D effect of its curvacious, highly reflective surface upon the verticality of the city. It’s actually called ‘Cloud gate’, but I’m not sure anyone actually uses that name. I’m sure we’ll go back tomorrow.

 

who you gonna call?

So when you have a city, with great housing stock, an impressive river front, and a well preserved downtown but you don’t see any people . . . what do you do? Design a new museum? Zone for more residential? Build a new live/work development? as an architect, a planner, a developer . . . in which role would you be in a better position to revitalize a downtown? Or to reconnect a strung out suburb?

Today’s visit to downtown Cincinnati was almost a complete lost cause – nothing was open. A nice Sunday afternoon walking in a dense, downtown environment and all the cafes were closed, the (free) botanical gardens were essentially empty, and the few retail shops we found all had their lights out.

But at least that area was unique. It had the townhomes of San Francisco, the hills of Rome, and the riverfront of Jacksonville. The town of Colerain, out by where I was staying, could have been anywhere on the outskirts of all those places. The car lots, the big box stores, the isolated chain restaurants, the fields of parking.

Gas prices were a topic of big concern out there, and how some poorer families were stretched to afford to both drive to work and put food on the table. How do you help an area that has developed so dependently on the car? It would cost billions to completely retrofit the area to be similar to a downtown environment, which is what some urbanists would be having you believe is the best solution.

Are architects all-encompassing enough to assist in the situation? Or are they so limited in scale that their typically single building intervention wouldn’t make a difference? Would a planner have more to offer, even with their lack of being able to see a project through? Or would it be an educated developer, with the money to back a project and a walkable design for an entire district? Who could best step in to lead the way for outerlying suburbs to densify their pre-existing retail/office nodes with transit oriented development? Maybe even a lawyer, with a specialization in zoning and code issues could better help a strung out town develop itself into something recognizable, something with a sense of place, more completely than an architect.