Let's Take a Trip Down Fullerton Boulevard!

Ok, so it's actually an avenue, but then I wouldn't have been able to work a reference from 60s East LA garage-punkers Thee Midniters in the title. But it COULD be a boulevard...it COULD be a lot a things. This street is a topic of special interest to me personally, as I live just a couple blocks south of Fullerton in Logan Square. Here in my neighborhood, Fullerton has a 100-foot right-of-way, a remnant of it's history as one of the city's busiest streetcar lines. It's also a commercial dead zone. Up until 1949, a streetcar line ran as far west as Central Avenue, letting off passengers (and customers) every couple of blocks. Today it's a four-lane, high-speed automotive corridor (and one which is generally impossible to cross on foot). Between the Chicago River and the street's terminus at Grand Avenue (roughly six miles), vacant storefronts abound. East of Ashland Avenue, Fullerton narrows to Chicago's standard 66-foot width, and commercial activity picks up markedly.

Here's a classic example of how designing streets for cars first and everybody else second hurts businesses and communities. What was once a thriving retail corridor is now rather uninviting. There are pockets of commercial life, but there are often gaps of several blocks between businesses. It doesn't need to be this way. Fullerton possesses relatively wide sidewalks, perfect for sidewalk cafes and the like, but with cars careening by at 40mph it's not a very conducive public space. With a road diet paring down the road width from 100 to the standard 66 feet, there would be room enough for separated cycletracks and a light-rail or BRT line, without sacrificing a single oh-so-precious parking space.

Sections of the street are already captured by various TIF districts, but with so many commercial vacancies it can't be generating much revenue for the city. In my mind, development projects of this nature are exactly what TIF funds should be used for, large-scale investments in a neighborhood's future.

More to come on this in the future. These are the things that I dream about.

Everybody Loves the Sunshine

Everything old is new again. Was flipping through one of those Taschen photo books at a friend's house recently and this caught my eye. A quartet of young Berliners enjoying their "green roof" in 1926. Enjoy the long weekend, everybody.

Walgreens Revisited

About a month ago, I did a post about a case study for the Walgreens located at the intersection of Milwaukee and Wood in Wicker Park. It got a pretty good reception, but was only meant as a rough outline. Yesterday, I was visiting the same friend's apartment and looking down at the store. I would now like to give you some revisions. These are still working with the existing structure, but this option would be significantly more expensive since some renovations to the store would be necessary.


Here is an overview. If you look at the previous post, in this version I have moved the streetside wall of the building in a few feet to widen the sidewalk. I have also widened the pedestrian plaza at the northwest end (lower right corner in this image). This would take another couple of parking spaces away from the lot. (Before anybody complains about the loss of parking, I should note that the metered spaces along Milwaukee adjacent to the building are rarely used.) I have added a bus shelter for the stop that currently exists here, and several amenities to make the space more inviting. And since it's Earth Day, I went ahead and threw a green roof on there.


First, the section southeast of the store entrance. This posed the biggest problem before, because it's such a long blank wall. Here I have moved the wall back about five feet but left the display windows jutting out to the sidewalk.The triangular shape next to the window is a translucent glass-block atrium window, beside that is a walk-up window serving as a coffee & news kiosk. Above is an LED news ticker displaying headlines. I have added some cafe tables and landscaping to break up the monotony, along with pedestrian-level streetlights. Out of frame to the left (but not included in the model anyhow), I thought that perhaps the last window could serve as a walk-up pharmacy counter.


Now to the northwest. Right outside the entrance, a flier kiosk where neighborhood residents can post notices. More cafe tables, and a group of outdoor chessboard tables. Elotes cart still in tow.


And finally, the view from the northwest. Here we see a small fountain surrounded by benches, a new covered bus shelter (not CTA-standard, but a lot nicer-looking) and more pedestrian-level lighting.

And that's what I've got, any comments are greatly appreciated.

Freeway of Love

Photo: US National Archives

Los Angeles has made the news lately in the world of urban designers and transportation planners with their plan to cap the downtown portion of the Hollywood Freeway with a park. This isn't a new idea, as blogdowntown noted (two years ago!), similar proposals go back at least as far as the mid-80s. Small caps have been constructed in Seattle and Columbus, Ohio, and of course there's the case of Boston's "Big Dig". For more than a decade, Portland has been toying with the idea of various caps on that underused relic of the city's brief Robert Moses fixation, Interstate 405. Seoul has gone them one further and completely removed a freeway, restoring the river beneath and adding some rare green space to the city, and actually improving traffic flows in the area in the process. The chief obstacle has always been cost, LA's plan faces a preliminary price tag of a billion dollars.

I'm not against the idea, rather it makes me wonder how this country ever found the money and political will to build these freeways in the first place. Under the guise of national defense, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 was passed with little opposition and allocated $25 billion over thirteen years...it wound up costing five times that and going 22 years over schedule. Adjusted for inflation, that would be an initial outlay of nearly $200 billion today. That's a very conservative number, since the price of labor and materials hasn't risen at a level commensurate with inflation and building codes are stricter than they were fifty years ago, especially in earthquake-prone regions. In 1956, the House was split 232-203 (almost identical numbers to today) and the bill passed 388-19...given the state of Congress these days I can just imagine the odds of achieving that same result.

And what did it get us? Five decades of government-subsidized sprawl, urban decay, no real traffic relief and an ever-expanding, ever-aging infrastructure to maintain. I'm not arguing that the country didn't need a federal highway system, but what if it had been done right the first time around? Did we need multiple freeways cutting through every city, or just lines connecting population centers for purposes of commerce and troop deployment? How many congressional districts receive no Interstate highway funding? So far as I can tell, just one: Alaska...though they get plenty of federal money in other forms.

I think the places that have the option of capping freeways got off lucky, even if they can't afford it now. Robert Moses gets a lot of attention (deservedly) for cutting neighborhoods in half via the trench of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, but Richard J. Daley's minions in Chicago's planning department were busy building walls with their freeway money. These elevated roadways placed a physical barrier between the city's expanding African-American neighborhoods on the West and South Sides and the white ethnic neighborhoods across the road. As anybody who's ever walked through a Chicago underpass in winter (or summer, or fall, or...) can attest, they are not the most pleasant pedestrian environments around. These delights serve as de facto homeless shelters, pigeon roosts and garbage dumps. The intersection of Kedzie & Belmont in the Avondale neighborhood is particularly awful. What was once a bustling street corner and intersection of two well-traveled streetcar lines is now entirely in the shadow of the Kennedy Expressway. Belmont Avenue is bisected by 400 feet of railway and freeway viaducts, immediately followed by a large (never-full) parking lot and big box stores. 400 feet is the width of two city blocks east-to-west. I used to live nearby, and found myself annoyed by the state of affairs on pretty much a daily basis.

You can't tell me that this is the best use of valuable urban real estate. This is one small section of interstate in one small section of one city, when you start to think about how many homes, businesses and other neighborhood amenities were destroyed nationwide it's absolutely mind-boggling. Cost aside, it would be political suicide to even suggest such a thing today. So, given all of the reasons above, why are some people still so in love with the idea of building freeways?

The Walking Shopper's Dilemma

Grafton Street, Dublin; Flickr photo by rutty


I don't own a car. Haven't had one for about ten years. My girlfriend does, and we use it for running various errands and trips out of town, but I do the majority of my shopping for groceries and everything else on my bike or on foot. Even in a highly walkable city like Chicago, most of our stores were designed and built with the driving customer in mind, often at the expense of everybody else. The grocery store up the street from our house requires anybody arriving by foot to walk around the end of the security fence into the driveway of the parking lot in order to enter the building...not exactly the safest route.

Richard Layman had a post on urban supermarket design a few months ago that struck a chord with me. He makes the assertion that most grocery and drug store chains don't design their urban stores to take full advantage of their locations. This is something that really bothers me, particularly about Walgreens in Chicago. If you don't live here, they have locations all over the place, and it seems like a new one pops up every couple weeks. The company was one of the pioneers in the use of GIS to target their retail openings, and that is especially evident by the appearance of stores in "food deserts". I don't have any problems with a company using technology to find an underserved market and create a niche for themselves, though it always kind of depresses me when I see people doing their grocery shopping at a drug store with limited food options. But I digress. My problem is with the cookie-cutter store design. They are so ubiquitous that most mid-scale retail development seems to copy their format. Having a basic template is hugely cost-effective in the construction process, but it is impossible to differentiate between a Walgreens store in the neighborhoods of Chicago and one in the outer suburbs (apart from the size of the parking lot).

Yesterday afternoon I was in Wicker Park visiting a friend at his apartment, his front window looks down on the entrance to the Walgreens store at Milwaukee, Wolcott & Wood. (The intersection itself is another problem, and will possibly be the subject of a separate post in the future.) This is an older store, built in the 60s or 70s but the basic problems are the same. First of all is the problem of scale and street frontage. From the end of the parking lot to the furthest corner of the store, the footprint faces 282 feet of Milwaukee Avenue. This may not seem like a great distance, but that's the width of eleven standard Chicago buildings. On the pedestrian level it's basically a dead zone. If you're walking southeast on Milwaukee, first you pass the parking lot, then a long blank wall. Here's a rough model of the site, most other Walgreens I've seen in the city share the same basic alignment with the street:



Again, this is rough, and not precisely to scale, but it's close. You can see how a person walking past is completely out of proportion and would have to walk for some distance before they were engaged. Compound this with the issue of snow and a store like this literally becomes an impediment. In Wicker Park, the Special Service Area maintenance fund pays for snow removal, but in other neighborhoods this entire length of sidewalk would likely remain unshoveled all winter.

The second problem is with the entrance istelf, from a pedestrian view it's just not very inviting. I sat watching people come and go for some time, and I would venture to guess that a full half of the customers did not arrive by car. This is a neighborhood with a very high mode share for walking and cycling and the site use should reflect that. I watched as people bumped into acquaintances, or waited outside in the spring weather while their companion shopped. This is a public space, and should be treated like one. It's unrealistic to call for every Walgreens in the city to be torn down and rebuilt, but with a few minor design changes they could be better urban neighbors and take advantage of increased pedestrian traffic at the same time. Here is another rough model illustrating how getting rid of the Milwaukee driveway (the parking lot would still have an entrance on Wolcott) and losing a whopping four parking spaces, the sidewalk could be widened into a pedestrian plaza.


The result is a much more pleasant streetscape. The store is fundamentally the same, but much more attractive to passers-by. Large windows facing the street on the Milwaukee side could engage pedestrians with tantalizing sale offers, and if somebody sitting on a bench feels like a frosty cold beverage, they could walk across the street to the 7-11, but the path of least resistance is straight into the Walgreens. Of course I couldn't leave out an elotes cart...

Designing Streets as Public Places in Cold Climates

I'm reposting a video of a hugely interesting presentation given last month by Kristian Villadsen of Gehl Architects at McGill University in Montreal. Mr. Villadsen makes a number of important points about designing streets on a scale for pedestrians, creating beneficial microclimates, giving priority to bike lanes for snow removal, and cultivating a year-round "culture of public life". He brings numerous examples from Copenhagen, as well as Beijing, Sweden, New York City & even Greenland. Hopefully, Chicago's planners are taking copious notes.


via copenhagenize