Jul

28

A trip down memory lane: neighborhood planning in Southeast Seattle

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The Rainier Valley Post has a great editorial today.  Gathering zoning, transportation policy history, World’s Fairs and Kunstler in one place is enough to get Great City’s heart racing!

Othello N’hood Planning in a Broader Historical Context (OP-ED)

July 20, 2010

in Development,Opinion,Transportation

By Mona Lee

I recently read that the dream of the American suburb was born at the New York world’s fair in 1939.  1939 was coincidentally  the year I was born too.

At the heart of the fair exhibit entitled “Futurama” was a huge scale model that showed what American cities and towns might look like with cars zipping down wide highways, stand alone houses with spacious yards and attached garages.  So while street cars were still stopping in Columbia city with people getting on and off to do their shopping in stores along the sidewalk, the nation’s collective consciousness began zoning wide arterials like Martin Luther King Way, then called Empire Way, for the purpose of moving automobiles out into the suburbs.  The result was the C1  (commercial one story) pattern of zoning with big box stores, commercial strips, and acres upon acres of parking.

So throughout my life time, the American suburbs spread out from the cities taking over the land.  No questions asked.  We built what I call “car world.”  But in the mid 1990’s the architectural critic, James Howard Kunstler published an article in the Atlantic Monthly that reflected an emerging collective awareness that maybe this all had been a mistake.  This emerging consciousness was called “new urbanism.” More…

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