Coming home from Thursday night's stakeholder meeting of the Broadway/Valdez Specific Plan, I was struck at how the day had formed a perfect case study for some of the ideas about density that I'm reading in Jane Jacobs' book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. One idea in particular that stands out is her thesis that the most vital neighborhoods have a blend of the old and the new, as well as a diversity of uses behind those facades. You can see this in action in three distinct (and vital) neighborhoods: the 24th Street corridor in San Francisco's Mission district, Manhattan's St. Mark's/Lower East Side, and Alameda's Park Street commercial strip.
Earlier in the day I had taken a walk down 24th to meet a friend for lunch on Alabama. The neighborhood still has a strong Latin flavor, mixed with the skinny-pants bleeding edge hipsterdom that leaks over from Valencia and Guerrero. But not one flavor dominates. Twentysomethings on fixed-speed bicycles mix with Mexican families in cowboy hats and bolo ties and "independent contractors" trying to sell you books and music on a blanket laid out on the sidewalk. You notice the diversity in building use and architecture as well: THX 1138 mod BART styling becomes California gothic cafe to Art Deco cinema-performance space to Victorian walkup flat. The eye has somewhere to travel, with varying degrees of height and color. The prevalence of street murals doesn't hurt, either.
Alameda's Park Street has a more conservative blend of styles and uses; for starters, it's cleaner and less urban than 24th. Its strengths lie again in variety of building height and usage. Looking up from the pedestrian street you can see diners in the upper floors of the China House restaurant on the corner of Park and Santa Clara. You can get Mexican food, toys and comics, coffee and ice cream and antiques here. Chain blends with independent. Side streets invite exploration.
St. Marks has the great advantage of being part of an island that few tourists want or need to drive through. You are immediately engaged with the action on the streets and the windows of the tenements and businesses that open to the sidewalk. Like 24th, there is a variety in building height, age, style, and function. Blocks are short, breaking up the monotony one finds in the outer boroughs of a place like Queens. While Oakland is primarily a car-based city and reflects this reality in its strip design, it is important to bring Manhattan into the dialogue for contrast.
For a future Biff's to succeed as a pedestrian-friendly destination, it must engage with its surrounding streets and act as punctuation for the Valdez strip. Its placement on the 27th street island gives it a unique advantage in that it can draw people from Broadway as well as Valdez.
The great truth about Broadway is that few people will want to walk its expanse. It is a boulevard for the car to bring motorists into downtown. Could this wide street learn from even wider boulevards around the world, from New York to Paris, on how to soften the impact of the car? The Valdez approach treats the area organically from the bottom-up rather than top-down. We are seeing the Uptown area transformation in pieces from Luka's to the Fox to Flora to the new apartment buildings and the Art Murmur that fills its streets. All of these pieces of the puzzle bubble up into the area that Biff's occupies.
I'm going to use a typographical book metaphor to conclude. Perhaps what can be gleaned from the successes of these three streets is the necessity for punctuation, diversity, and variety of spatial use and function. Look at the book page (and if you want to be specific I'm looking at Donald Barthelme's Eugenie Grandet in his Sixty Stories collection): White space with title in 18pt. type. White space. Quote in 10pt. type. White space. Begin story in 12pt. type. White space. Bullet. Story in 12pt. type. Hand drawing.
What have we learned here? That Barthelme is a visual writer, sure. But transpose this onto the cityscape and what do you get? 24th Street, St. Mark's, Park: Space, big statement, space, smaller statement, space, story, stop, short story, mural. Ultimately it's the difference between the monotonous 1950s Stalinist housing block and the messy, lively jazzy Greenwich Village street. Or the difference between Barthelme and a tax document. The end result and the effect on our spirits is the same: engagement vs. deadening. Building up or beating down. Let's keep building up, engaging the street, engaging the pedestrian, punctuating the space.
