Blogs

Turning Alleys Into Neighborhood Spaces

Issue Date: Thu, 2009-01-01
Page Number: 13

Large American cities are increasingly trying to improve their alleys’ aesthetics, environmental performance, or sociability.

In 2007 the City of Chicago issued “The Chicago Green Alley Handbook,” aimed at installing permeable paving, introducing planting, and relieving flooding along many of the city’s approximately 1,900 miles of public alleys.

Recently Los Angeles has been looking at how to create park-like settings or friendly neighborhood spaces in some of that city’s 12,309 blocks of alleys, with encouragement from the University of Southern California’s Center for Sustainable Cities.

The most energetic alley improvement program now underway is in Baltimore, where Community Greens collaborates with neighborhood groups and City Hall to reclaim rundown and often crime-ridden rear passages.

Community Greens — an initiative of Ashoka, a nonprofit international “social entrepreneur” organization based in Arlington, Virginia — began working with the Patterson Park Community Development Corp. in 2003 to convert a decrepit Baltimore alley into a place where residents would feel secure and might mingle with their neighbors.

That alley, between Luzerne Avenue and Glover Street in the Patterson Park neighborhood, was outfitted with planters, potted plants, benches, and a barbecue grill. Gates were installed near the ends of the alley, and garbage collection was moved elsewhere — first to areas in front of the houses and later to the lots of the path.

“It’s been nothing short of transformational,” says Community Greens’s director, Kate Herrod. “Where there used to be pimping, crime, and drug activities, they got safety and community.” She says rAs a result, residents “feel much more safe and committed to their block” than before.

The success led Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon to sign an ordinance in May 2007 that authorizes “gating and greening” of any alley where the adjacent residents overwhelmingly request it and where there is no objection from the city departments of police, fire, sanitation, transportation, and public works. If 80 percent of the owners of the surrounding occupied houses approve it, various improvements can be made to the alley. The surrounding homeowners must consent unanimously before gates, trees, or other vehicle obstructions can be included in the upgrading.

Patterson Park has a reported 14 blocks carrying out alley improvements, considering them, or requesting authorization. In addition, about 60 unions in 22 Baltimore neighborhoods have expressed interest in the program.

From the perspective of New Urbanism, the conversion of alleys to communal spaces has both an upside and a downside. Over the past 20 years, new urbanists made alleys an accepted part of contemporary planning, even in suburbs that historically lacked them. Many developments — in cities, suburbs, and small towns — have introduced or reintroduced alleys to upgrade the neighborhood atmosphere. Rear passages have become inconspicuous for garages, garbage collection, and utilities. Baltimore’s move toward closing some long-established paths goes against that trend.

If many alleys are off-limits to parking, that could divert parked cars to the streets. One danger in the emerging trend toward converting paths into private or gated neighborhood spaces is that it could reinforce the conventional practice of putting driveways or garages in front of houses. That pattern undermined the attractiveness of many American residential streets during the past six decades. However, in Baltimore’s program, off-street parking is sometimes installed at the ends of the alleys.

The specifics vary widely. In a redeveloped portion of Patterson Park known as Dexter Walk, the area behind the houses has been designed to be pretty open to the alley and the neighbors. Residents can drive in and park their cars behind the homes. However, the space expanse becomes a good spot for block parties and other neighborly activities when the vehicles are removed. The houses were built without fences between properties so the alley and the rest of the rear area could be used for community events.

Baltimore’s experiment with new treatments for alleys stems mainly from the city’s severe crime problems. The greening and gating of paths can be “a way for people to create defensible space,” Herrod says. But, unfortunately, many approaches have become no-man’s-lands, she observes. “This initiative is really to help residents take ownership over spaces where there are issues of crime, dumping, and vandalism,” Nathanson confirms.