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SE Jerome and Rich make some of the best points. One of SE Jerome's points in particular deserves to be reproduced:

"I say all that to say that the Southside streets are all chopped up and that’s why yungins be getting chopped up. One ways, back-cuts in cuts, unpaved alleys, our streets are where murderers can and do lurk."

While neither SE Jerome nor Rich said this explicitly, one of the main points I draw from their comments is that one of the biggest issues facing East of the River is the lack of complete streets, a policy whose implementation is not necessarily reliant on having a street grid. Taking a page (or rather, the first 4 chapters focused solely on sidewalks, and then some) from Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," the issue of sidewalks, and complete streets more broadly, has HUGE impacts on safety and overall prosperity. In one anecdote talking about the falsehood that children are safer playing in suburban public parks than they are on urban streets (a well planned, complete street that has homes and apartments with windows/balconies/porches actually facing the street), she talks about the number of adult eyes on the street. These adults, some of them from the neighborhood, many of them just strangers passing through, didn't have their eyes on the children because they were particularly concerned about them, but because the street's design lent itself to that kind of visibility. At one point, she recalls counting something like 12 children playing in the street in front of her house, all within eyesight of about 14 or more adults at any given time, many of them passersby from other parts of town. Said strangers, along with some residents of the street, made swift work of a scuffle between the children over a bag of candy.

Now, the density of her Greenwich Village neighborhood in NYC, compared to the much lower densities found East of the River, is not really an issue here. Those children weren't safe because the neighborhood was dense (see Jane Jacobs' eye-opening critiques of even the most subtle screw-ups - which make a huge difference - in the design of high-density public housing projects). Overall neighborhood safety is an issue East of the River in large part due to the fact that the built environment there is insular, as SE Jerome pointed out: lacking in adequate sidewalks, mixed-use zoning, businesses and homes oriented toward the street, etc.). As Rich pointed out, it's too easy to get caught up with density as the best or most desirable solution to the challenges faced by those living East of the River.

by Kenney on Dec 27, 2010 3:40 pm • link • report