Newsletter of the Preservation Coalition of Erie County (Home Page)
June 1996
Table Of Contents
From uselessness to useful city
by Tim Tielman
Understand that nobody in his or her right mind would spend $24,000,000 of his or her money for a granite-trimmed serration on the Buffalo River in which to angle ships that are already there, though differently angled. Also understand that no one is going to be moved to put up a building or set of buildings on this serrated platform based on the fact that some city agency (DDI) just spent $24,000,000 on it.
So the task before us is to find idiots with money.
Or to deliver ourselves from the nightmare in which the city is prepared to spend $24,000,000 of taxpayer money on an empty, bizarrely shaped platform at the foot of Main Street. And then go begging hat in hand to developers to please spare it the embarrassment of the platform being empty.
The. Menckenesque boobourgeoisie forcing this useless Horizons Lite plan on the Mayor (who will gamely try to force it on the public) is a booster class whose measure of success is ñ Iím serious here ñ the amount of money spent in conspicuous fashion. The higher the figure, the better they look in the airline magazines, which breathlessly hype the latest urban renaissances. It is too bad throwing money at the waterfront is not going to work.
Letís remember that the waterfront is not a problem, nor is it the answer to other problems. It is a distraction. Our problems as a city and society lie elsewhere (a fact of which voters tend to be well aware). Even our problems with a well-functioning downtown lie elsewhere. The waterfront should properly be subservient to other civic needs. Being subservient does not mean being forlorn or ignored, just lower in its demands on the public purse.
One way to do this is to merely go back to the time-tested forms of establishing communities or place-making that have worked since antiquity. The Greeks developed the gridiron plan of tight streets lined with small landholdings and modified it to suit topography and existing buildings. James Oglethorpe, in founding Savannah on the Georgia coast, similarly platted it out in small lots. A contemporary print shows a compact settlement of small, equally-sized lots, each with a small house directly on the public street, with a palisade or fence protecting and enclosing private space behind each house. The plan is interrupted at regular intervals by tightly defined public squares. This templateñexpanded and preserved through thick and thinñhas resulted in making Savannah one of the most livable and pleasant cities in the country.
Railroad towns of the American and Canadian west also took on this pattern. To speed settlement, railroads were given public lands in mile-wide strips on each side of whatever rails they could lay down. In the race to place and finance rails, the companies established towns at regular intervals and promising places. The towns were platted out in small lots. The aim was to get buildings up quickly that were visible from the stations, so lots were sold cheaply and with little or nothing down. Lots were sold with the stipulation that they be built upon within a short time, typically 12 months. This was to prevent speculation while at the same time conveying prosperity and promise.
Most of these developments occurred without overt philosophizing about urban form and its economic and ethical ramifications. But several American communities were founded by people with strong convictions of how the physical dimensions of streets and lots effected economic and human behavior. One such person was speculator William Cooper, founder of Cooperstown, NY, and father of novelist James Fenimore Cooper.
A new book, William Cooperís Town by Alan Taylor (ISBN0-394-58054-0) contains an illuminating account of the founding and planning of Cooperstown (The book recently was awarded a Pulitzer Prize). According to Taylor, ìCooper intended his village to prevail in a competition with other upstate villages for the people, capital, and institutions that distinguished a preeminent market town. Cooper imposed a spatial design upon his villageÖ[envisioning] Cooperstown as an especially dense and compact village. In 1788 he hired a professional surveyor to survey, arrange, and map the village around a handful of buildings and through the surrounding tangle of trees, brush, and stumps.
ìAt Cooperís insistence the surveyor subdivided Cooperstownís blocks into 197 small, rectangular lots. Most lots had only 25 to 50 feet in street frontage and ran back 150 feet. By design these were unusually small and narrow lots for a new village on the New York frontierÖ Willing to sell unusually extensive tracts of countryside, Cooper insisted on restricting village lots to especially small dimensions. He insisted that village and country, villager and farmer, had to be starkly dichotomized for the benefit of both.
ìCooper believed that a compact, dense village of many small lots would develop more rapidly and stimulate more commercial activity because its inhabitants would have to specialize in a craft or trade.
ìAccording to Cooper, a village could make or break its vicinityñmorally and economicallyñdepending upon the dimensions of its lotsÖBy requiring industrious specialists, small lots would help Cooperstown best its rival villages in the struggle to absorb the trade, capital, and people of upstate New York.
ìIn A Guide in the Wilderness, Cooper dwelt on the importance of small lots and a compact village at unusual length, in special detail, and with particularly forceful, even angry, language. No other subject receives such extensive attention and intensive argument.î
It might be noted that Cooper, aware of the value of even modest buildings in a tenuous, pioneer economy, directed that existing buildings be worked around. Also, Cooperís empirical observation that small lots seemed to dictate energetic small businesses has been borne out in recent research by G. J. Ashworth [Dec./Jan. 1995-96 Preservation Report] and others.
Thus, just as it is possible to create conditions favorable to ìbig boxes,î it is also possible to create or maintain conditions favorable to ìlittle boxes.î An agglomeration of little boxes on little lots seems to produce useful and pleasant cities for residents and visitors alike.
Itís worth a shot, and doesnít have to cost the city jack.