The American Alley: A Hidden Resource

[M II A II R II K]

The American Alley, Part 1: A Hidden Resource


August 16, 2021

By Thomas Dougherty

Read More: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/...idden-resource

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Two defining spatial characteristics of the modern street, specifically in America, are their size in relationship to pedestrians and their lack of spatial definition. (Modern American streets aren’t framed by buildings. If urban space is the “room” of a city, the room is missing walls.) The “minor streets” of Philadelphia, as we will see, offer a striking exception.

- For almost half a century, architects and urban planners have worked toward transforming the modern auto-centric street to a more person-centric one. Their efforts, and especially the work of the members of the Congress for New Urbanism, have made huge strides toward bringing awareness to the general public of the inhuman nature of the modern city, specifically embodied in the modern street. However, the non-pedestrian scale and lack of spatial definition remains a vast, regrettable divide between almost all of today’s streets, and the streets that make up the historic towns and cities of Europe and the minor streets of colonial America.

- Inside traditional urban blocks are many types of public, semi-public, and private spaces fronted and formed by buildings and walls. That’s the inner block, and it’s perhaps best recognized in the form of your basic courtyard. This is perhaps the only place in many American towns and cities today that will allow the development of pedestrian-scaled urban spaces most easily seen along the residential alleyway. The American service alley, running through the center of a traditional urban block, was created at a time when city infrastructure looked radically different. Back then, the alley was home to the less-sightly aspects of daily life. Horses, necessary for most transportation, were stabled there, along with the vast amounts of manure they produced.

- The American alley is a resource that has been “out of sight and out of mind,” but it is now one that offers an opportunity for dramatic, value-enhancing redesign and development in many of our towns and cities. Improving alley and rear yard design can be approached at the scale of the individual lot, by a homeowner working independently of neighbors and city; or on a citywide scale, as we reconsider alleys as a network of secondary pedestrian streets. Or, perhaps best: somewhere in between, in which a creative collaboration between homeowners and the city allows for individual choice and initiative within a unified vision of the public realm.

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