Abstract
In 1919, American planner Karl B. Lohmann pondered ‘the question of alleys’ within a published review of town-planning principles for contemporary master-planned communities. In the early 20th century the back-alley was not necessarily ubiquitous in urban and suburban America, but it was commonplace; Frank Lloyd Wright, among others, had decreed residential back-alleys to be wasteful, unsightly anachronisms (Wright, 1916). Lohmann considered both the aesthetic pathologies of back-alleys and their added cost, while acknowledging their valuable ‘backstage’ utility; he concluded that back-alleys were still appropriate for commercial development, but were perhaps no longer necessary components of modern residential neighborhoods (Lohmann, 1919).
Back-alleys were almost unknown in post-Second World War American suburbs, until advocates of the recent planning trend known as ‘new urbanism’ began an attempt to rehabilitate the back-alley as a streetscape-enhancing strategy, particularly for residential blocks. The new urbanist critical position is selective – reaffirming the argument for utility, without due consideration for the problematic side of the issue that was so much in evidence in planning discussions of the earlier era. In neither era, however, have the arguments for or against back-alleys in residential environments concerned much beyond utility, cost, and aesthetics; almost completely overlooked is the residential back-alley's value or potential as a unique cultural landscape and as a vital, block-scale neighborhood social realm.
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Notes
1 It must be emphasized that not all alleys are ‘back’ alleys in the conceptual or practical sense. When an alley becomes inhabited to any meaningful degree – that is, when a significant number of residences or ancillary dwelling units become reverse-oriented such that the alley abuts their front yard and their primary access is via the alley – in that case the alley has become a de facto street. The author's concern in this study is the true back-alley – a redundant access to the back of properties which have a complementary street as their primary and front-side access. The author here uses the terms alley and back-alley interchangeably, simply to avoid the stylistic awkwardness resulting from repeated use of the hyphenated form.
2 This Second World War ‘dividing point’ actually includes the war years as well as at least part of the preceding decade. Due to economic conditions, new home construction lagged throughout the 1930s.
3 Here I am borrowing John Tillman Lyle's definition of a landscape as ‘the visible manifestation of an ecosystem’ (Lyle, 1991).
4 See, for example, John Stilgoe's vernacular American landscape ‘guidebook’, Outside Lies Magic (Stilgoe, 1998). In this and other writings, Stilgoe alerts his readers to the occult layers of history and meaning present in the structure and details of commonplace, overlooked landscapes.
5 An important distinction, of course, being that Ladd's Addition was designed with no driveways because when it was platted in 1895 there were no cars; the designers of Somerset (Duany Plater-Zyberk), platted exactly 100 years later, was designed with no driveways in order to hide cars.
6 Reviewing the history of town planning practice in America from the perspective of the early 1920s, architect/planner F. Longstreth Thompson noted that ‘the rectangular or gridiron from…has, until recently, been almost universal.’ (Thompson, 1923, p. 95) and that ‘the gridiron plan has been applied with ruthless persistence irrespective of its fitness’ (p. 100).
7 Spiro Kostof described this transformation best: ‘The grid of ruler-straight avenues of sixty-six feet (one chain) and ten-foot alleys gave way to a type of urban contour plowing with a hierarchy of streets of several speeds, slopes, and curvatures, branching out to deadends…’ (Kostof, 1992 p. 298).
8 F. Longstreth Thompson, an advocate of Garden Cities and of what he called ‘the Spider's Web Plan’ and ‘The Contoured Method’, as alternatives to the grid, allows that grids are ‘convenient’ for surveyors but have virtually no other redeeming characteristics. For his litany of grid deficiencies see Thompson (1923) pp. 95, 96.
9 Apparently similar sentiments toward back-alleys were characteristic of Canadian planning as well. A 1919 preliminary plan for a subdivision in Sudbury, Ontario was rejected by plan review authorities because of its grid pattern and because of its ‘…twenty-foot lanes which are not desirable or necessary in housing developments’ (Sendbeuhler and Gilliland, 1998).
10 Lewis Mumford, on the other hand, has colorfully and provocatively referred to American automobiles as ‘insolent chariots’ and ‘Detroit's indecently tumescent organs’ (Mumford, 1963 p. 242).
11 The FHA, of course, was itself heavily influenced by the writings and work of Lohmann and other leaders in the planning field of that era.
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Martin, M. The question of alleys, revisited. Urban Des Int 6, 76–92 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.udi.9000041
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.udi.9000041