/wanderings/urban
A Bad Urban Design Walking Tour
I live in the northwest corner of the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, not far from an “office park” to which has been added in the last few years a small shopping center with an American Bread Company restaurant. On occasion I walk over there for lunch, something I wrote about a year ago. Walking was obviously not intended. You are supposed to drive a car. Let take a walk anyway and see what happens!
We begin with Fond du Lac Avenue, the street I live on. Here at the northwest end, it look like this:
Not really an inviting place to walk, but at least wide.
The intersection of Fond du Lac Ave. and 107th Street is perhaps not too welcoming to pedestrians, either:
The next section of the journey is over Highway 145, a six-lane controlled-access freeway with virtually no traffic on it:
It was not at all hard for me to get a daytime photo with no cars visible. There is actually more traffic noise from the two-lane Fond du Lac Ave in front of my apartment building than from this six-lane freeway behind it. Total waste of pavement.
Next comes this segment of 107th street:
Welcome, pedestrians!
Then, another giant intersection, with Good Hope Road:
We are now nearly there! That building with the green roof at the left, in the far distance, is it:
But how do we get there from here? Remember, we were supposed to be driving a car, not walking. We could take the sidewalk north on 107th street, walk a long way, then follow a long curvy road back to the southwest, but we are not crazy, so we will walk on the grass.
We now discover a fundamental fact about building design in the US: each building has one front side, and one back side. The front side is prettier, and the back side is really ugly, windowless, with utility connections and dumpsters. What if one side of your building faces your parking lot and a small access road, and the other side faces a busy six-lane road, near a freeway ramp, along which many of your potential customers will be traveling? Well, the parking lot and access road side gets the windows, and the busy road gets this:
Hey, I like gas meters as much as the next guy, but is this really the face you want to present to the public? I thought the building was still under construction for a long time after it was done. I kept waiting for the windows. They did eventually take down the temporary banners and put up the permanent signs for each business, at least.
Once you get around to the parking lot side of the building, it looks a bit nicer:
Note the beautiful outdoor seating area in the parking lot:
There is a Starbucks and Qdoba on 124th and Capitol with an outdoor seating area right by the intersection of those two major roads, separated from them by a tiny strip of grass. It is such a strange place to sit that I sometimes go there just for the experience of drinking mocha while watching twelve lanes of traffic intersect. I mean, you wouldn’t want to do it very often, but occasionally, it’s so bad it’s fun. I don’t think the Atlanta Bread parking lot is bad enough to be fun. It’s just ugly.
category: /wanderings/urban | permanent link
