The soul-crushing emptiness of downtown DC

Public Spaces

The soul-crushing emptiness of downtown DC

by David Alpert • December 1, 2007 9:30 pm

410,000 people enter Washington, DC each weekday (as of 2005), the second-largest increase of any American city. But if you walk around large parts of downtown in the middle of the day, you might not think so. So many buildings face inward, with their public spaces in central courtyards cut off from the fabric of the city, feeding their workers in indoor cafeterias, leaving the streets and public squares (such as the park around the northwest entrance to Judicary Square) remarkably desolate. Even the new condos along Massachusetts Avenue have car-oriented driveway loops but no stores or restaurants facing the sidewalks. Is this really city living?

1 comment

Tags: bad streets, DC, downtown DC, photos, public spaces, urban design

New York public spaces good and bad (Oct 8, 2006)
DC does have some great public spaces, as do the suburbs (Jan 7, 2011)
Would a residential height bonus improve downtown? (Apr 28, 2010)
Downtown's zoning: How the best of downtown came to be (May 11, 2009)
Families, community, and the West End (Jun 17, 2008)

David Alpert is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Greater Greater Washington and Greater Greater Education. He worked as a Product Manager for Google for six years and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He loves the area which is, in many ways, greater than those others, and wants to see it become even greater.

Comments

This is so true. Those new developments seem really great at first, but that part of Mass Ave is really a dead zone. As long as we are building streetscapes that will last for decades or centuries, we are obligated to make them good ones.

by Matthias on Jul 17, 2009 12:55 pm • link • report