Ocean Parkway as stoop
I love biking along Ocean Parkway, which is almost the entire route from our apartment to Coney Island. It’s a wild mix of people and architecture and I love watching the old guys watching other old guys play chess and backgammon, sometimes with the boards on their knees.
Today’s NYT had a nice article about this strange stretch of European boulevard.
Elegant and sketchy, welcoming and insular, the striated band of roadway, trees and people called Ocean Parkway both reflects Brooklyn and divides it with a thick green line. It was designed about a century and a half ago as a place to promenade, to socialize, to pleasure-drive or to settle, on a street that looks like a park. The architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were inspired by the grand tree-lined boulevards of Europe, like Avenue Foch in Paris and Unter den Linden in Berlin.
In an 1867 report to the Brooklyn Parks Commission, the architects talked about the kind of person who might live on the parkway, a country boy of “superior caliber” drawn to the city by an “irresistible magnetic force.” But the metropolis and success would not be enough for such a man. “Day by day,” they wrote, “his life needs a suggestion of the old country flavor to make it palatable as well as profitable.”
This is nice story about how urban planning has paid off and resulted in the kind of urban life Jane Jacobs wrote about. At first blush, the city planners seem to be almost every bit as arrogant and social engineery as those of the Robert Moses era, referring to people of ’superior caliber’ and assuming that everyone is drawn to a city. But maybe they succeeded where others have failed because there was a real human insight there: that people living in cities, recently transplanted in particular but maybe all of them, have a need for open spaces and places to walk and mingle.
