Bigger bumpouts aren't always better

The first phase of construction to narrow down the failed Spring Street urban-renewal scheme is just about complete, and for the most part, it's an improvement: the ugly median barrier is gone, there are fewer lanes of traffic, sidewalks are wider, and bike lanes are coming soon.

But even with the improvements, Spring Street still feels like a forlorn, too-wide speedway through empty parking lots. The hope is that some of those parking lots will soon transform into buildings, and then Spring Street might feel more lively. But for the time being, it's still a sad place.

The weirdest part of the new street is probably at the western end of the project, where the 1970s urban renewal project ended. There, the old street quickly bottlenecked down from 4 lanes east of State to two lanes a block to the west. The traffic engineers' plan for eliminating that bottleneck in the new plan has been causing some controversy. Here's a cyclists'-eye view of what it looks like:

Photo by Steven Scharf

 That's Portland's newest, biggest sidewalk bump-out, sitting right in the middle of what clearly used to be the historic path of the old Spring Street.

Now, as much as I like bump-outs, this design is stupid.

On the north (right, in the photo above) side of this corner, there's a clearly-defined street wall defined by the Little Tap House building, mature street trees, and other historic buildings a little further on up the street. And on the south side, there's a city parking lot – a remnant scar of Spring Street's urban renewal demolitions and a prime opportunity for a new building that could activate the corner.

But for some reason, the engineers designed the new Spring Street to avoid the historic corridor. Virtually of the site's contexts – the buildings, the trees, the streetlamps – tell motorists and cyclists to "stay right", but the paint on the pavement says, "swerve left, then right."

This, unsurprisingly, is confusing people. The Press Herald even got photographs of a driver rolling their car right over the new bump-out. To the driver's credit, this is exactly what the street's visual cues suggest you should do. But if you're a traffic engineer looking at a blueprint of the intersection, you don't see those visual cues, or the intersection's historic context.

Portland Press Herald graphic

Here's another problem with the bump-out: the reason it's so huge - two lanes wide! - is because on the eastern side of the intersection, in front of the Portland Museum of Art, the new Spring Street incomprehensibly bloats to 3 lanes, including an idiotic double-right-turn lane. While the rest of Spring Street got a road diet, this particular section senselessly got a widening.

The sudden bloat in turn lanes is obviously confusing to drivers – the driver who got caught cruising over the bump-out is trying to drive straight on Spring from one of the new right-turn-only lanes. The intersection worked just fine when there were only two westbound lanes there, though. Getting rid one of the three westbound lanes there and restoring the former layout would be an easy short-term fix.

And here's my final beef with the bump-out. The city owns a parking lot on the south western side of Spring Street. Greater Portland Landmarks owns the building on the southeastern side of Spring Street. Both of those corners are prime opportunities to activate a new Spring Street with attractive new buildings that match the context of the historic neighborhood and honors the historic street wall.

If we were willing to shrink the bump-out AND sacrifice one of the new right-turn-only lanes, we could actually get more pedestrian space overall, and get a more sensible intersection, and put more city-owned real estate to work to create new housing. How about it, City Hall?

The Social Life of Congress Square

In their pitch to the City Council, the architect for the Eastland Hotel's development proposal for Congress Square included a number of points from William H. Whyte's book "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces," a brilliant empirical study of what makes successful city parks work.

There's a great film version of "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" that illuminate Whyte's theories with detailed footage of New York's Seagram Plaza circa 1980. It's a lot of fun to watch, and not just because it offers a filmed version of the people-watching that attracts us to good parks. Whyte's observations and photography also brilliantly illuminate how subtle elements of design — things most of us don't consciously notice — can have tremendous impact on how public spaces are used.

Any Portlanders interested in Congress Square and its future should treat themselves to spending an hour with this film. Enjoy!

William H. Whyte - Social Life of Small Urban Places from Robin van Emden on Vimeo.

New proposal for Congress Square

My colleague Randy Billings has a good write-up of the Eastland Hotel's updated plan for Congress Square Park, including a couple of renderings.

I want to withhold most judgment until I see more details of the plan, but my first impression is that this is at least a big improvement over the last proposal we saw last summer — and probably an improvement over the status quo. It looks like the main question for the city now will be whether we want to hold out (and pay) for something better.

Another choice for Congress Square

As many readers of this blog undoubtedly already know, the task of improving the mediocre public space at Congress Square has had the attention of a city-appointed advisory committee for some time now, and the new owners of the Eastland Park Hotel have pitched a proposal to buy most of the park's real estate from the city and turn it into a ballroom for conventions and events.


Unfortunately, the Eastland Hotel's proposal has galvanized the debate. On the one hand are out-of-town hedge fund managers who want to convert public space to private use. On the other hand are suburbanite activists who are treating this half-acre of downtown Portland like it's Yosemite Valley. The goal of creating a higher-quality public space that benefits the entire neighborhood has been mostly lost in the shuffle.

So thanks to Clifford Tremblay, an architect who recently moved to Portland, for trying to change the conversation. Clifford pitched these ideas for Congress Square at a Portland Society of Architects "Drink 'n Crit" earlier this winter (I was on the design jury while he presented this concept and I'll try to paraphrase his pitch here).

Courtesy of Clifford Tremblay

Clifford's proposal consists of two fundamental elements: activating the center of Congress Square by inviting through-traffic, and activating the edges of Congress Square with new uses and friendlier edges.

As for the first challenge — getting more people into the center of Congress Square Park —  Clifford proposes a new diagonal orientation for the park, to encourage cut-through foot traffic from Congress to High Street (see site plan above). The center of the park would become a secondary pedestrian-oriented street, defined by a row of trees and a water feature. Clifford makes the point, echoing a number of other architects and members of the citizens' advisory committee, that the current park's sunken design, with several steps leading down into the park from Congress and High, should be eliminated. Clifford would level the park with Congress Street, and relocate a more modest set of stairs leading up to the park to the western edge of the site.

Courtesy of Clifford Tremblay

The second crucial aspect of Clifford's proposal — and again, it's an idea that's been echoed by several architects, business owners, and neighborhood activists — is that the edges of Congress Square need to be more porous in order to invite more public use and public ownership. The sketch above shows a view of Clifford's proposal from Congress Street, with the Eastland hotel in the background. Note the active sidewalk dining on the eastern side of the park (this building, the former "The Kitchen" restaurant, is supposedly under contract to become a new haute-cuisine restaurant). The northern corner of the park, currently a no-man's land of bleak shrubs, is here transformed into a more inviting — yet still relatively secluded and quiet — spot for tables and a performance stage.

At the rear of the site, Clifford has optimistically suggested new windows and awnings to the Eastland Park Hotel's facade (currently a blank wall painted with a mural). Last of all, note the previously-mentioned lack of stairs between the sidewalk and the park. Sure, it's just a Sketchup drawing, but it looks a lot more inviting, doesn't it?

The primary strength of the ballroom proposal from the Eastland is that it provides an economic development boost to this part of the city. Still, what they're pitching isn't nearly good enough to overcome the opposition's strident concerns over the loss of open space. I don't particularly agree with those concerns, but from a purely pragmatic perspective, the owners of the Eastland need to do a whole lot better in terms of their own designs (a preliminary and pathetic example of which is pictured at left) if they really want to convince the public to surrender the less-than-perfect status quo.

This is valuable real estate in the heart of the Arts District. What if the City built — and collected rent on — a row of small artists's studios built to screen the Eastland Hotel's blank walls? What if the City leased park space to the new restaurant on the Congress Street side? These new uses could generate new rental revenue to support park renovations, while adding to the park's vibrancy as a public space, and improving property values in the surrounding neighborhoods. The Eastland Hotel's current proposal frankly can't compete with these possibilities.
 
This is still public space, and Portlanders absolutely should demand a higher standard of design. Thanks to Clifford Tremblay for changing the conversation in the right direction.


 

The a-park-ment

Today is Portland's first participation in the global Park(ing) Day event. Jess and I, with Morgan Law of Kaplan-Thompson Architects, built this "a-park-ment" on Fore Street. It's been a fun day with lots of well-wishers dropping by and enjoying the new public space:

The a-park-ment is meant to draw attention to the city's housing shortage by noting the fact that a single parking space occupies roughly as much real estate as a small studio apartment (our structure, pictured above, actually didn't use the full length of a standard parking space).

Old news to anyone who reads this blog, but if City Hall sold its surface public parking lots — just a small fraction of the city's government-owned parking — for redevelopment, the real estate could contain over 20 new buildings the size of the new Oak Street Lofts building in the Arts District, with nearly 800 new housing units, which would generate an additional $1.25 million every year in new tax revenue for the city.

Just sayin'.

I've written a more detailed report with a lot more photos of the city's six inaugural Park(ing) Day parks over at the LiveWork Portland blog.

This was a nice place, once.

Here's a good example of a successful public space. It's a view of Lincoln Park, as it was sometime near the beginning of the 20th century, from the Library of Congress archives (hat tip to Corey on the ArchBoston forum):



I suspect that this photo is looking east from a vantage point near the corner of Congress and Pearl Streets. But it's hard to tell, since every single one of the stately, mansard-roofed houses in this picture has been demolished, and a third of the park was bulldozed to give Franklin Street arterial a wide, empty median that's of no use to anybody.

Will Portland's "transit-oriented" development offer a way in for transit riders?

The Thompson's Point mixed-use development proposal heads to its first workshop at the Planning Board on Tuesday afternoon.

Commenters on this blog and elsewhere have been giving the proposal mixed reviews, accusing it of being too suburban in its style and layout to be considered a real "transit-oriented" development.

I think that's fair, but I also believe that some minor changes could improve it drastically, and make it much more successful as a business venture for the developers and as an interesting place to go for visitors.

This week's planning board workshop will be a good venue to advocate for urban design improvements. It's still early enough for the developers to make changes, especially if those changes might, in the long term, add value to their development.

Here's the site plan as it currently stands. The big building in the middle is the sports arena and event center; just to the south, and sharing a wall with the event center, is a hotel and restaurant. Two mid-rise office buildings are on the southern tip of the peninsula.

Now, imagine that you're a conventioneer arriving here from Boston by bus or train. You walk out the front door of the station and turn left towards your hotel, crossing the train tracks on your way, and see the event building where your event is being held. But then you get annoyed: the main entrance is all the way on the other side! You end up walking roughly the length of a football field, dragging your luggage, to round the corner - at which point you then need to walk along the edge of a large parking lot before finally getting to your hotel lobby.

May I propose a slightly better way?

Instead of attaching the hotel and event center, which inconveniences foot traffic, the Planning Board ought to ask the developers to include a pedestrian street running east-to-west between the events building and the hotel and restaurant. This would give transit riders a shortcut to the complex's other spaces, but it would give the developers a neat little outdoor space to give their development some street life - potentially something like Yawkey Way or Portland Street in Boston:

A more modern example is the "Center Court" outside Portland, Oregon's Rose Garden (in the photo below, the basketball area is on the left; a complex of restaurants and shops is on the right):

I imagine that the developers had initially proposed to attach the hotel to the event center to make it easy for caterers to move between the two spaces, thus easing operations. That's valid. But I used to work in hospitality myself, and there's an old joke that the way to make your work as efficient as possible is to get rid of the guests altogether. And in a way, that's what's happening here. Is having your caterers cross a narrow outdoor space such a high price to pay for accommodating your thousands of car-free guests from New York, Boston, and elsewhere?

Transforming Forest Avenue - Corridor Walk and 1st Public Meeting

The Great Lost Bear is the same distance from Monument Square as the Western Prom (about 1.3 miles) - but while a walk through the West End is pleasant, a walk along Forest Avenue through the freeway interchange and along the strip of drive-through banks and fast food franchises is almost unheard of.

A lot of the city's planners and leaders would like to change that, so they've commissioned a study that's now underway called "Transforming Forest Avenue."

"The goal of this study is to develop functional and safe pedestrian, bicycle, bus and motorist access both along and across Forest Avenue - a key gateway corridor. This study will also look at land use, leveraging public investments to stimulate private redevelopment and infill of underutilized properties."

The study should also look at options for Exit 6, the cloverleaf freeway interchange that blocks Forest Avenue from the rest of downtown Portland.

The study's steering committee met for the first time last week. Unfortunately, it sounds from their reports that people aren't bringing a lot of vision or ambition to this - there's a lot of "sure, Forest Ave. is bleak, but what can you do?"

Hopefully, members of the public can come and change that attitude tonight, at the study's first public meeting, by bringing some big ideas and letting the planners know that this can and should be a walkable main street for the city.

Transforming Forest Avenue - Corridor Walk and 1st Public Meeting
May 12, 2011

Corridor Walk: 4:30 pm-5:45 pm
We will meet in front of the University of Southern Maine Glickman Library on Forest Avenue.

Public Meeting: 6-8pm
At the University of Southern Maine Abromson Center (on Bedford Street), Room 109-110.

For details, call Molly Casto, Senior Planner at 207-874-8901.

You Can't Build Speed Bumps to Slow Down Thuggery

[note: excerpts of this post originally appeared on my other blog, The Vigorous North.]

This is a blog about creating better public spaces and safer streets in Portland, Maine. Typically, that's meant that I write about better architecture, or streets where cars and their sedentary lifestyle don't threaten our health and safety, or creating more affordable and egalitarian transportation options.

But yesterday I was reminded that we live in relative luxury if these kinds of issues are really the biggest ones our city faces. In many parts of the world, after all, people aren't merely threatened by car traffic and lack of economic opportunity. In many parts of the world, people are also threatened by institutionalized thuggery, rampant crime, corruption, and civil war.

I write about comparatively benign local issues I do here not because I think that those international problems are trivial, but because I believe that working locally is the most practical way for me to have a positive impact on the world at large. Creating a more sustainable community here seems to me to be the best way I can make an impact on the seemingly intractable problem of global climate change, for instance. And my activism for affordable transport and affordable housing also aims for Portland to sustain its egalitarianism while it also provides more economic prosperity for more people - including the refugee populations that are seeking new homes in Maine after experiencing terror firsthand.

Still, my focus creating better public spaces and a more sustainable, prosperous economy might lead readers to believe that Portland - or any American city, for that matter - doesn't have to worry about thugs in the streets and institutionalized racism. And that's not true, unfortunately. And the fact that it isn't true is a far bigger threat to all of us than car exhaust and distracted drivers - as deadly as those things can be.

On my bike ride to work this on Monday, the morning after the news broke about Osama bin Laden's assassination, I passed by our neighborhood mosque, just a few blocks from my house, and I saw this.



And, in addition to this, more graffiti that said "Long live the west" and "Go home."

Somewhere in this city I love there is at least one cowardly neo-Nazi who has the disgusting gall to believe that religious persecution is somehow an American value.

Seeing this provided a visceral demonstration of how rage can beget more rage. I found myself wishing I'd had the presence of mind to head outside and check on our neighbors last night when I'd heard the news. With a baseball bat.

But what good would that really have done? This is just graffiti, and it's already been painted over. American Muslims, unfortunately, have suffered much worse. The real damage is the toxic, self-consuming hatred that still persists, not only in the bitter minds of those who did this, but even in the dim intellects of presumably "upstanding" members of our community. Let's not forget our daily newspaper's publisher, Richard Connor, the dimwit who apologized for running a front-page story about local Ramadan celebrations last September 11, and then humiliated himself and his city by broadcasting his racist cowardice on national radio.

Make no mistake: the fact that Americans among us could behave this way is much more of a threat to our public safety, and to the American republic itself, than Osama bin Laden ever was.

If Osama Bin Laden's death spurs cowardly, Klan-like hate crimes like this one, then there is nothing to celebrate. The terrorists are still among us.

Bayside Ice Arena

Here's a good suggestion for a public space hack from Corey Templeton, from his blog Portland Daily Photo: turn the perpetual puddle on the City's Bayside lots into a public ice rink for the winter:



[photo illustration by Corey Templeton - click for a larger image from Corey's blog]

It's worth noting here that this empty lot is, indeed, a public space - it's owned by the city, and targeted for future downtown growth. Unfortunately, the City is simultaneously intent on flooding the office market with cheap, car-dependent cubicle farms in the city's outskirts - a confused economic development strategy that will likely keep this downtown lot empty (save for its puddle) for years to come...

Public Space meets Work Space in Bramhall Square

Bramhall Square is a neglected public space on the West End that's had a hard time living up to its potential. It has a lot going for it: it occupies a prominent place at the junction of several neighborhood streets, and is a kind of gateway to the historic West End for anyone coming into town from the west. It's also a short walk away from the Maine Medical Center, the city's largest employer and a 24-hour hub of activity.

But it also has serious shortcomings. A dense thicket of trees and 70s-vintage park benches make the Square feel dark and neglected. Even though there are lots of historic buildings in the area, the Square's pedestrian space, along the eastern edge of the square, is defined by squat, uninteresting buildings. Things were a lot better three years ago, when Percy's Cycles provided a public gathering spot for people who could drop in and learn a few things about bike repair, and Binga's Wingas next door was a boisterous neighborhood pub. But Percy moved out (he's just partnered up to start a new shop on Parris Street) and Binga's burned down. For the past couple of years, then, the Square's been characterized by a string of marginal businesses and this burned-out eyesore:

View Larger Map

Now, independent developer Peter Bass is putting together a creative new project that would replace the fire-damaged Binga's Wingas building with something that could go a long way towards re-invigorating the Square with new life.

Above: a sketch plan of the proposal from the City's Historic Preservation Board, by Archetype Architects. Bramhall Square is to the left.

Bass is proposing Portland's first office building that would be solely dedicated to "coworking" - shared workspace for freelancers, consultants, and other individuals who need an alternative to working from home. Users would save on overhead costs by sharing things like a conference room, kitchen, wifi, and office equipment, and benefit from an increase in social and professional interactions.

The Cooltown Studios blog has written a lot about coworking projects elsewhere, and how buildings like these can cultivate a city's creative economy by giving freelancers and other workers a more formal, affordable, and collaborative place to do their work.

By replacing an empty eyesore with a dynamic working space - one where workers are likely, on nice days, to bring their flexible, wireless offices outside into the Square - Bass's proposal could also do a lot to bring life and vibrancy back into Bramhall Square.