Great Lakes Cities

[Crawford]

The Midwest cities were much more overscaled and monumental than their equivalents in other parts of the U.S.

When Toledo declined, the gaps were really apparent. If Nashville, one day, declines, it won't be quite as apparent bc the city was never intended to be monumental.

[iheartthed]

Woodward is more of a grand avenue than a High Street -- I don't think Columbus's High Street is a great analogy to it. Detroit's avenues were meant to resemble the wide Parisian arterials.

I was in Detroit last month and I can say pretty unequivocally that Woodward Avenue looks much more cohesive in person than it does on those street views. I'm not sure if that's due to the timing of the Street View photos, or if for some reason GSV doesn't really capture wide avenues very well. But it appeared that nearly every unoccupied lot between downtown and the Grand Boulevard was being built on. And this was after a year and a half of pandemic.

However, I do think/agree that Detroit created an unintended problem by tearing down urban fabric to widen the avenues. But, I don't think that this is a fatal flaw. The reason they did that in the first place was to make room for streetcars, interurbans, and vehicular traffic, and also the eventual implementation of a subway system. At some point the city planning lost its way and just erased everything else in favor of the traffic lanes. But I think it's pretty obvious if you drive around Detroit today that the city leadership is trying to get past its car fixation. They are converting traffic lanes to bike lanes in all parts of the city, which seems to have reduced the psychological width of a lot of the wide streets.

Anyway, back to High Street vs Woodward. A more accurate analogy of High Street in Detroit is probably anything that isn't a radial avenue. And just about all of them could use a lot more infill, including even the ones in the best of shape. But I don't think Cass or Second Avenues, or John R Street are exactly lightyears behind High Street:

Second Avenue: https://goo.gl/maps/TeWSWjL6TE2QSXj17
Cass Avenue: https://goo.gl/maps/NJUGKhy8R3MhusyC6
John R: https://goo.gl/maps/U4hGTDtKXYryEmiB8

Again, not claiming any of those are as well developed as High Street at the moment, but these are the three streets parallel to Woodward Avenue through Midtown Detroit, and they seem more like the analogy of Columbus's High Street to me.

[shappy]

Originally Posted by kool maudit

Yeah, this angle really says "Toronto" to me:



Reminds me of the area around Dupont a bit. Or maybe Dundas in The Junction?

Yes, you're right, Toronto vibes for sure (Hamilton as well). Definitely not the Junction though - it's much healthier and more substantial overall as it used to be the downtown of West Toronto (as it was known prior to annexation).

I'm getting a Rogers Rd or Mt. Dennis vibe.

[Acajack]

Even if they look somewhat similar, if you look more closely the retail mix on those Toronto high streets does seem to be a level or two above in terms of, um, "classiness".

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Even if they look somewhat similar, if you look more closely the retail mix on those Toronto high streets does seem to be a level or two above in terms of, um, "classiness".

Probably. It's a very working class Hispanic immigrant area. But it's a fairly vibrant area, if not rich.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by shappy

Yes, you're right, Toronto vibes for sure (Hamilton as well). Definitely not the Junction though - it's much healthier and more substantial overall as it used to be the downtown of West Toronto (as it was known prior to annexation).

I'm getting a Rogers Rd or Mt. Dennis vibe.

Makes sense, the old borough/city of York is a working class interwar suburb that hasn't really seen gentrification.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Probably. It's a very working class Hispanic immigrant area. But it's a fairly vibrant area, if not rich.

I find the lingering effects of certain categories of retail (subtly or not-so-subtly) boycotting inner cities are still quite apparent in many parts of the US.

This never really happened to any significant degree in Canada.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by Crawford

The Midwest cities were much more overscaled and monumental than their equivalents in other parts of the U.S.

When Toledo declined, the gaps were really apparent. If Nashville, one day, declines, it won't be quite as apparent bc the city was never intended to be monumental.

In general I feel like the Great Lakes developed a "missing middle" issue earlier than some parts of the country. There were gigundo-sized buildings (apartments, office towers, giant factories) and there were wood-framed detached single-family homes, but there was not much of anything at the mid point where you get the ideal density for a vibrant pedestrian experience.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by edale

Wow, I just took a streetview tour of Queen West, and it's a pretty damn impressive urban corridor. I think you Toronto forumers are being far too gracious in response to some of these claims. Cleveland, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Detroit all have nothing comparable to Queen West. Toronto and Chicago are head and shoulders above the rest of the Great Lakes cities, and it isn't remotely close. Quibbling over who has more historic fabric is meaningless when the one city is bursting at the seems with energy and people and the other group of cities are shells of their former selves and have major areas of abandonment and decay.

Yeah, it's a debate that tends to get channeled very narrowly and it manages to float far away from the simple on the ground reality of what these cities are like today. Cleveland and Toronto might have been somewhat comparable in 1920, it was probably a stretch in 1970 (with Toronto building more modern transit and highrise housing), and by 2020 they were far apart. One aspect that doesn't get much attention is the level of commercial intensity or variety of businesses in these areas. I love old heritage buildings but they do not by themselves make for great streets, and they are just a small part of the building stock in cities like Toronto.

Canadian cities have arguably been diverging from American cities for some time now. Chicago looks to have a healthy amount of modern infill construction but it still doesn't look much like what is being built in Toronto.

I think the prewar architectural discussion tends to be a little off too. Toronto has a large overall volume of heritage buildings but they tend to be finer in scale, less monumental, and in the 1910's-20's era they were more conservative than what was being built in the US Great Lakes cities. To me it looks like the US had larger scale capital investment (i.e. when it happened it tended to happen in bigger spurts) and more standardization early on. An example of this process today is how some major developers in Ontario will take on projects around the GTA or in smaller Ontario cities.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Acajack

I find the lingering effects of certain categories of retail (subtly or not-so-subtly) boycotting inner cities are still quite apparent in many parts of the US.

This never really happened to any significant degree in Canada.

I think boycotting isn't quite the right terminology. Areas like this in Detroit were never really filled with chain stores. Storefronts like this were occupied by small individual mom and pop businesses. When the tenants decided to move on, for whatever reason (retirement, insolvency, etc.), there wasn't demand to keep the spaces occupied. This was more due to the changes in how Metro Detroiters lived, plus a glut of commercial space in the suburbs, than it was due to a deliberate attempt to boycott.

Metro Detroiters lifestyles became much more car oriented in the post-war era, and the city became inconvenient. It's easier to live a car-oriented lifestyle when you have a guaranteed space at a suburban strip mall, than when you have to circle the block five times waiting on a street parking spot to open up.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Even if they look somewhat similar, if you look more closely the retail mix on those Toronto high streets does seem to be a level or two above in terms of, um, "classiness".

Well, yeah. I'm talking vague similarities re. legacy urban form, not socioeconomic similarities in 2021.

SW Detroit is traditionally the poorest part of the city. This was never a posh neighborhood. It's a poor Mexican neighborhood, with some Appalachian remnants.

But up to the 1980's, the Streetviews would have been pretty similar.

[kool maudit]

Yeah, I mean -- it's Detroit. It's a miracle there are that many little buildings still standing so close to each other.

[benp]

Originally Posted by eschaton

In general I feel like the Great Lakes developed a "missing middle" issue earlier than some parts of the country. There were gigundo-sized buildings (apartments, office towers, giant factories) and there were wood-framed detached single-family homes, but there was not much of anything at the mid point where you get the ideal density for a vibrant pedestrian experience.

That is a generalization not true for all Great Lakes cities. Chicago is only 25% single-family detached, Buffalo 32%, Milwaukee 44%, Cleveland 54%.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by eschaton

In general I feel like the Great Lakes developed a "missing middle" issue earlier than some parts of the country. There were gigundo-sized buildings (apartments, office towers, giant factories) and there were wood-framed detached single-family homes, but there was not much of anything at the mid point where you get the ideal density for a vibrant pedestrian experience.

I see why you'd get that impression, especially looking at a Detroit today, but I don't agree at all. Detroit had tens of thousands of 2-family flats and 4-family flats, and a not so insignificant amount of actual row houses, and even more almost row houses. But these were all in the parts of the city that deteriorated the most over the past 30 years, and thus so much of that stock was demolished

[kool maudit]

Originally Posted by The North One

Great Lakes cities were not really built to any different scale then the rest of the pre-war post-colonial United States. I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Sure they were. The individual downtown buildings were larger, and the housing was more sparse.

It's a few of these:



Surrounded by a bunch of this:



And the thing is that those houses, unless teeming with large families, boarders, laneway tenants etc. in a period of super-growth, won't support a city's worth of imposing prewar commercial and office.

So the big chunky downtown guys either disappear or become kind of isolated complexes, and the strips wither and turn into sparse, auto-centric development.

Obviously, white flight and deindustrialization were what led the Great Lakes giants downhill. But they had a narrow tipping point; a city like Montreal or Philadelphia is held up, to a degree, by its dense residential vernacular. And that's not true of Detroit, Cleveland or Buffalo.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by eschaton

In general I feel like the Great Lakes developed a "missing middle" issue earlier than some parts of the country. There were gigundo-sized buildings (apartments, office towers, giant factories) and there were wood-framed detached single-family homes, but there was not much of anything at the mid point where you get the ideal density for a vibrant pedestrian experience.

That certainly doesn't apply to Chicago, where the brick multi-flat reigns.

In fact, just like a million other Chicagoans, we proudly live in one!

[kool maudit]

Chicago is really an exception, perhaps due to the fire?

[edale]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Anyway, back to High Street vs Woodward. A more accurate analogy of High Street in Detroit is probably anything that isn't a radial avenue. And just about all of them could use a lot more infill, including even the ones in the best of shape. But I don't think Cass or Second Avenues, or John R Street are exactly lightyears behind High Street:

Second Avenue: https://goo.gl/maps/TeWSWjL6TE2QSXj17
Cass Avenue: https://goo.gl/maps/NJUGKhy8R3MhusyC6
John R: https://goo.gl/maps/U4hGTDtKXYryEmiB8

Again, not claiming any of those are as well developed as High Street at the moment, but these are the three streets parallel to Woodward Avenue through Midtown Detroit, and they seem more like the analogy of Columbus's High Street to me.

Why do you think High and Woodward are not comparable? High Street is not a side street in the slightest-- it's part of Ohio state route 23 which goes all the way from Kentucky to Michigan, and it's one of Columbus' major thoroughfares. It's not as wide as Woodward, but I don't think any street in Columbus is as wide as Woodward.

None of the other three examples you linked to are anything close to High Street. John R looks to be mostly parking garages and surface lots, so really not sure about that one. High Street has been 25+ years in the making of historic rehabs and intense levels of infill. When I first visited Columbus in the 90s, the Short North (High) was pretty shady, and a nascent arts/gay district. But it was pretty run down and pockmarked with vacant lots and abandoned buildings. It's remarkable how far it's come in a pretty short timeframe.

High has dense, desirable neighborhoods on either side of it for miles, and it connects two very attractive poles-- Arena/Convention Center District on the south, and OSU campus on the north. It has 3 miles of unbroken urban vibrancy, and the street maintains a human scale despite being a major transportation thoroughfare. I'm far from a Columbus booster, but from a Midwest perspective, High Street is pretty damn impressive.

[iheartthed]

The first image below is Detroit's density map from 1990. There were about two dozen census tracts with a population density above 12,000 people per square mile at that time. On the map, you'll see there's a cluster of dark red tracts somewhat southwest of Highland Park. Those areas were almost all filled with 2-family flats, a few 4-family flats, and some low rise apartment buildings (there wasn't a ton of sfh, and what little did exist was built very densely). The flat style housing was one of the most common styles of housing in Detroit. It style looks like this:

2-family: https://goo.gl/maps/XqfwG3LCUqe6uQs76
4-family: https://goo.gl/maps/1tyRxuKrQ5vA1ReXA
Typical apartment building: https://goo.gl/maps/t78Gtn285wkusbPD9
A typical sfh in that area: https://goo.gl/maps/tKvNvt3Ai4xHWkZM9


This was a mostly black working class area into the early 90s, but there was hardly any abandonment in this area. Somewhere in the mid to late 90s, the bottom fell out.


source: https://detroitography.com/2020/06/1...-density-1990/

There is an image in this link that shows Detroit's density map from 2010. As you can see, the density of those same areas southwest of Highland Park declined to the same tier as the single family oriented areas on the far west and far east sides of the city. I wouldn't at all be surprised if these are less dense than the single-family outer areas in the 2020 census data. But these were neighborhoods that supported densities of +20,000 ppsm at one point in my lifetime, and I'm younger than 40.

This graphic is a great representation to show what happened to Detroit. Over the span of 50 years, Detroit's population went from being an iceberg to a big puddle of water:

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by edale

Why do you think High and Woodward are not comparable? High Street is not a side street in the slightest-- it's part of Ohio state route 23 which goes all the way from Kentucky to Michigan, and it's one of Columbus' major thoroughfares. It's not as wide as Woodward, but I don't think any street in Columbus is as wide as Woodward.

As I said:

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Woodward is more of a grand avenue than a High Street -- I don't think Columbus's High Street is a great analogy to it. Detroit's avenues were meant to resemble the wide Parisian arterials.

It's basically the same distinction that some Torontonian commenters were alluding to, and I kinda see what they mean in hindsight. Detroit's radial avenues were inspired by the French, while Toronto's grid is more British. Detroit has a category of street that Columbus doesn't appear to have (never been to Columbus, but I take as face value what you present at their most prominent street). Cass, Second, and John R, aren't side streets. They are known as secondary arterials in Detroit, but they seem to be the same scale as High Street in Columbus.