Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
^ even allowing for a "minimal setback" your lacrosse example is probably 10,000x more common in the midwest than your Dayton example.
The Midwest in general just doesn't do "tight" residential streets. Hell, even in Chicago, far and away the densest city in the region, parkways (tree lawns) and front yard setbacks rule on like 95% of residential side streets.
I wonder if the seeming infinity of flat land out here had an impact on the psychology of those who built the cities and towns sprinkled across the hundreds of thousands of square miles of corn fields.
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Really, a lot of it comes down to who settled what.
There were two big streams of settlers who came to the Midwest. One of them were the New England Yankees who came through the Great Lakes via the Erie Canal. The other were people from Pennsylvania and the Upper South who came down the Ohio River.
Yankee architecture was notably different from England because they really liked to build with wood instead of brick. They also liked to spread out houses a bit side to side. Old urbanism in
Upstate NY and
New England is a bit tighter than in the Midwest, but still not super tight.
In contrast, in the Midlands people liked to build with brick, and built as close to the sidewalk as feasible. This continued in diminished form in the river valleys all the way out to St. Louis (and even a bit up the Mississippi river valley to Galena, etc.)
Of course in both cases setbacks from the street also increased over time, but Yankee houses crept back from the street much more rapidly than Midland houses.