PANEL 5
Plan and aerial view of consolidated parking on residential street, using land from buildings condemned through the urban renewal program. A pedestrian path transverses the backyards of homes, with greenspace at one end, and a playground at the other.
COLLETTE CREPPELL
"Warner and Olson’s streetscapes challenge us to reconsider certain tenets of urbanism. Where we might today declare the primacy of the street edge—with the domain of the car, the pedestrian and the building edge as layers from public to private.
In Warner’s vision and Olsen’s renderings, one sees instead the primacy of shared public space, even on residential blocks. In Panel 2, this shared space is created by an urban plaza at the scale of a housing block set back from the street. In Panel 5, this communal zone is defined on the very interior of the block—letting go of the concern for property line demarcations and even drawing in a parking zone. In Panel 8, the PARK sign on the property side of the sidewalk invites the public into the private zone—while the street, interestingly, is rendered devoid of vehicles. (Note in Panel 8 the animation of the pedestrian plaza against the layered backdrop of both historic and modern housing.)
In the post-war period architects and planners had the problem of the automobile to solve. How refreshing—for a moment at least—to consider the vehicle as a benign presence on the interior of the block (Panel 5)."
DAVID BRUSSAT
"Panel 5 represents a largely unobjectionable effort to consolidate parking amid an unidentified block of houses that may or may not be rehabilitated. If the houses are owner occupied, the families toward either end will object at the distance they will have to walk to get to their cars. All on-street parking in the city was banned then and for more than half a century after the survey. The consolidated parking lot may be the survey’s effort to avoid destruction of side gardens and backyards, which did result from that ban. Now it has been lifted but it may be too late to trigger a return of gardens: Another example of poor city planning. (Sorry, I’ve edged off-topic!)
Nodes of historical houses such as this one - and again, it is unclear what surrounds it - exemplify what most of the survey district might have looked like if insensitive planning and design ideas had not been incorporated. Fortunately for College Hill, most of those ideas, the bulk of which were to have been privately financed, were abandoned as individuals such as Beatrice O. “Happy” Chace formed companies through which much of the fabric that would have been sacrificed was saved."