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December 23, 2004
More on the neighborhood
I made two freehand maps with annotations to follow up from my post about my neighborhood. The first map is of the entire walkable area around our neighborhood and the other is specifically of the buildings directly around our house. (Incidentally, I also found some neat photos of the area described in the second map, which used to be a little resort called Seiders’ Springs in the 1800’s.)
(I’ve also added some photos taken on a recent walk around my neighborhood.)
Making maps like this purely from memory, even of buildings and streets you see every day, is surprisingly hard. Of course it’s hard to get the scale right, but I was surprised at how difficult it was to make a complete inventory. I’ve spent the last couple of days now doing this, and when walking or driving around it, I’m still noticing or remembering places I’d left out.
You might not be able to tell from the list I made that started this little exercise, but we actually live in one of Austin’s “medical districts” (there’s even a nearby street named “Medical Parkway”) with a couple of hospitals, several large buildings full of doctors’ offices, some surgeons’ offices and specialty medical practices, and a number of medical support businesses (like a wheelchair and scooter store and a uniforms store).
I think that part of the reason my inventory was hard is that our neighboorhood is poorly suited to walking. The general area is bounded by three major roads: Guadalupe (properly pronounced “GWAD-ah-loop”), Lamar, and 38th streets. Lamar and 38th meet at one of the slowest intersections in town (annotated here), one of those intersections you can never get through without waiting. All of the businesses I listed require us to cross one or both of those streets. Although there are sidewalks, they’re inconsistent and discontinuous; you can’t get to the gelato place from our house without jogging accross 38th st where there’s no sidewalk on one side.
Because of this discontinuity, our local sidewalks are almost totally useless, although they seem to be kept in good condition. I can’t imagine strolling along window shopping in any of the areas these businesses are concentrated in, mostly because none of the concentrations are really great enough to bother; mostly no more than four or five shops together. Even within those clusters, many people probably drive from place to place rather than park and walk between them. The scene from Jane Jacobs described in the first paragraph of this article, would be impossible here.
The area with the highest potential “strollability” is a section of 35th st fairly close to a highway exit, so cars tend to be still moving pretty fast through there. Plus, those stores’ parking areas are directly on the road itself, so there’s really just this big expanse of concrete entirely meant for cars. I guess in a nutshell, I wouldn’t want kids, even young teenagers, walking or biking from our house to the places I listed, and we live on the edge of a large residential area also close to those businesses.
There is a lot to admire in terms of “adaptive architecture” around our house, though. Many businesses are in renovated small houses, and shops have gone from ice cream shop to clothing store apparently painlessly. My friend Scott’s design business used to be in a building accross the street that once upon a time was an electronics junk shop called Radio Ranch. Radio Ranch was a very cool place, sadly long gone, and now an Avis car rental store—maybe the most useless business in our whole neighborhood.
Posted by Andrew at December 23, 2004 09:35 AM