Bass Ackwards (UPDATED)
A lot of people hate alleys. They don’t understand them. They’re dirty, they’re dangerous and in this day and age, they really don’t serve any purpose. Valuable real estate given over to weeds and rats.
I’m sure you’ve heard that critique before.
Then you have to ask yourself; why are all these new subdivisions, the ones with the quarter million dollar homes lined up in unison, all seem to be built facing an alley?
In the traditional neighbourhood development of the early 20th century, alleys were commonplace, providing the “business end” of running a household. Deliveries were taken, cars housed in their garages, garbage collected - all this happened quietly and discreetly in the alley. These were all the things that were better left unseen while we kept our best face forward at the front of the home; big, wide front porch for lounging and greeting visitors, lush gardens and ample sidewalks for the multitude of pedestrians making their way about the community.
But we’ve forgotten about what it means to our sense of community to have this separation of tasks. When we combine the utilitarian aspects of an alley with the face we put before our friends, family and community, we really lose our identity - sort of like Cybil.
So now, we seem to have elevated the functionality of our homes at the expense of the aesthetic qualities of our communities. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing (functionality is absolutely necessary) but it shows where our priorities lie. Now the first design feature guests sees when they stop by to visit is our two/three car garage instead of a big, welcoming covered porch complete with porch swing. We obviously value our automobiles more than our friends. We display our garbage front-and-centre (showing off the box of that big, new 65 inch television, perhaps?) once a week instead of leaving it in the alley where it can be quietly disposed of. Our front yards have grown while our rear yards constrict, which is the complete opposite of how a successful pedestrian friendly neighbourhood was designed.
Do we automatically assume that just because a certain way of designing communities is old it must be replaced? Do we dispose of ideas and theories when they reach a certain age, regardless of how well they work? How many other valuable lessons do we disregard in the name of progress? It is time once again to begin to value the quality of our communities. To invest in buildings that will last more than 25 years while creating public spaces that will encourage residents to come out and smell the roses. By continuing to let the bottom line guide our lives at the expense of our sense community, we will never stray from the “Bic” way of life that is costing us more than just a few extra dollars on our property tax bill.
UPDATE: I had to include something that was passed along to me at the (seeming) request of JCS and myself by one of SD’s big supporters. Here is the short story by Al Roach entitle “Alleys Of Our Youth“, and I hope I’m not breaking too many copyright laws here, but it’s a beautiful story that I wanted to share with everyone, appropriate as it is. Here it is, Part 1 and Part 2 with all writing credit going to Al Roach. Thanks again to JCS and our emailing archivist…
Tags: community building, pedestrian, place making, residential, Urban Design, urban sprawl, walkable
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never been a fan of those types of cookie cutter homes where the garage is the main feature. it really says alot about our society and how car is king.
i live in south windsor and my house is a cute little 1-1/2 storey built in the 1950s with no garage (gasp!!). In the last few years 2 new behemoth size homes were built on either side of me. the two car garages are front and centre. the unfortunate part is that i now have two brick walls facing me on either side and i never see my neighbours. i grew up in olde walkerville and knew everyone on my street. saw my neighbours nearly every day. now i go weeks (months in the winter) without even catching a glimpse of whoever it is that lives next door to me. no sense neighbourhood or community. kinda sad.
We miss you too, PC…
No garage? I can beat that. No garage and no driveway either! [DOUBLE GASP] Talk about slummin’ it!
As to the practise of putting up big garages with a wee house behind, I think the 65″ TV set brag rule applies here too. People like to park their status symbols in full view of their neighbours, and pull out of their garage in their new Lexus crossover so all their neighbours can see. It’s no fun creeping out of a crummy ole alley in $65,000 of metal and plastic, is it?
On a side note, Chris, you might enjoy reading Al Roach’s heart-felt missive on the joy of alleys in All Our Memories.
I’m going to check into that book, JCS. I wonder if anyone reading this right now is at the library right now and can check out it’s availability
You can also check from the comfort of your own home:
http://wpl.werlnet.net/uhtbin/cgisirsi/mxPKQO5J3H/1_CENTRAL/104570060/60/1172/X
They have a bajillion copes of it, it seems. (bajillion = 10 in this case)
Thanks for coming to my rescue, Ms. Poseur
Count me in on the “no garage/no driveway” club too.
Less to shovel in the winter
Mr. Roach used to be an English teacher of mine at Kennedy Collegiate. I read both of his books and liked them back then. All of Our Memories is out of print but I Walkerville Publishing sells teh All of Our Memories II which is another great book since Al Roach grew up in Walkerville.
Personally I can’t stand the “house attached to the garage” look of homes today. No architectural value at all. But then again in N. American society what value do we really place on anything anymore?
As an avid walker who does four or five miles a day, let me suggest to you that our alleys should be converted to walkways. There are distinct advantages to walking through an alley, especially in a Windsor summer…the most obvious of course is that you are separated from the belching exhaust of vehicles……
Because you are not walking on pavement (usually), it is cooler to walk through the alley and there are often shaded portions because of trees planted in peoples’ yards………
You would be amazed at how far you can go through alleyways…Walkers get to know the coolest shortcuts…unlike cyclists, we don’t depend on concrete and asphalt to get around.
Preserving our alleys seems to be something that the scaledown constituency would be inclined to support……I would appreciate it if someone can tell me how to get a map of all the alleyways in the city, especially the Pillette Village, Riverside area
Rusalka, the City of Windor’s MapMyCity application might be of some use, it shows land parcels along with transportation layers so that alleyways are somewhat delineated by the gap between land parcels in a given city block. It’s on the City’s website, on the main page.
From the looks of it, it’s pretty much the same application that we used at the City for municipal-related services (I used to work in the Transportation/Infrastucture group) albeit with less personal information attached to the land parcels, obviously.
You raise an idea that most people don’t consider! Alleys are truly something to marvel at. I spent a number of years biking through alleys with a friend, stopping to photograph the urban practicality that they provide. They may be dirty, smelly and rundown, but alleys principally serve in the same way that hydro, water and sewage infrastructure function; and like those messes of pipes and wires throughout every inch of society, they play an instrumental role in the name of functionality. Nowhere else either will you find such quiet and serene, natural inner metropolitan settings (beside parks I suppose) than that of alleys. I love too what the residents of Monmouth accomplish with yearly alley parties.
Growing up in the area of Pillette and Seminole, we as kids used the alleys as our own highway and an area of car free play. There were no garages because every house had a driveway for one car, few if any owned two cars! I remember one time, the city was putting stone down the alley between Olive and Pillette, us kids spent weeks scouring every stone for fossils and quartz cystals, then one day, Mayor Reaume came to see the work being done, pulling up into the alley with his car and we showed him our collections and he said something like; I didn’t see the alley as having an educational value and laughed!” He also, as I remember, he knocked on few back doors along the alley to talk to our mothers about anything that concerned them.
Yes, I am dating myself but there was a mother at home in almost every house in the east end at that time, that is why us kids felt so safe as we ran the neighborhoods but if you got into trouble, you learned very fast that you couldn’t out run the telephone!
But I liked the alleys around my grandmother’s house on Bruce the best, there were garages and more established alleys to explore and play in. When running errands to the A&P on Ouellette, I could use the alley ways and knowing which yards I could cut through, i never really had to cross a major street at an intersection. Exploring the alleys, us kids would find who had apple trees growing in the backyards and how we could get some of those green apples in the early summer, especially if the branches came oh so close to the back fence!
I remember the Sheeny man with his high wheel horse drawn wagon, blowing his horn coming through the alleys looking for scrap metal! Did he make a killing when ice boxes were being replaced by the new fangled electric refrigerators! But then I also miss the horse drawn milk wagons, the knife sharpeners pulling their sharpening wheels through the streets and mothers coming out to have their knives and scissors sharpen. And sneaking up on the ice trucks delivering ice to the homes along the street. and stealing chips of ice from under the tarp! Then dashing between the houses into the alley to savour booty!
Alleys and back yard clotheslines are also the places us young guys got our introduction into the mysterious world of women’s unmentionables! Walking through the alleys and comparing which mother of ours had the biggest….ahem bras and the mystery’s of what breasts were and how they could all be different sizes or the biggest underpants or which of the girls on the block were starting to wear bras!
Oh the mysteries of life in an alley way!
Hmmm…..
I live in a home that is a few houses from a bar and Friday and Saturday nights, the sounds of drunks coming down the alley are unreal. I have lived here only for a short time and already I have heard three women screaming for help and being assaulted; and men who have been attacked as well. I’ve called the cops–they haven’t come. While allies have their purpose, in this woman’s opinion; they are dangerous places to be at any time of the day that give a discreet place for this kind of violence to happen. While I can understand the point of view of the poster and the “value” of these allies for building community; I wonder if there is some way that we can build communities that are safe places for all people to live and enjoy that also hide the trash and the automotive eyesores.
Things are very different now aren’t they? I wouldn’t travel down the alleys of my youth today either, especially in the core and at night! While tracking down the homes that my grandparents and parents grew up in the old core of Windsor, I went into those alleys of my youth and sad to say it looks more like a dumping ground from old cars and mattresses to just plain garbage.
With all due respect, there are plenty of assaults that take place outside the confines of the alley…some take place on the open street in broad daylight.
As Golda Meir once asked; “if not me, who?”…if we want our alleyways back for something other than dumpsites or crime sites, then we must start using them and pointing out their intrinsic value as avenues for walkers, children, cyclists etc.
I am so tired of the assumption that our roadways should cater to those in cars at the expense of everyone else. We could have gotten half of Riverside Drive closed off to traffic for a beautiful bike path…if our own bike committee hadn’t decided that what we really needed was to shove all cyclists off to the side of the road so that car traffic would not be inconvenienced!