I was in Brooklyn yesterday for a site visit, and my route to the subway took me along Washington Park, which is the name of the piece of Cumberland Street between Dekalb and Myrtle. That’s Fort Greene Park on the right.
Thought #1: There’s a great deal to criticize about late-nineteenth-century society, but the architects, planners, and builders of that era knew how to create a really nice residential neighborhood. (They also knew how to create vast unlivable slums, but that’s a different story and a different post.) The brownstone neighborhoods of Brooklyn, including Fort Greene, remain popular because they are nice places to live: human scaled, walkable, and visually diverse.
Thought #2: The parked cars mess it up. Not just visually (which is arguably the least important issue) but they take up half the width of the driving lanes, which is space that could otherwise be used for a dedicated bike lane, a dedicated mass transit lane, or frankly any use other than car storage. Switching to electric cars would be somewhat greener, but (a) not nearly as much so as returning to the transit-based city Brooklyn was when these houses were built and (b) will do little to improve the streets.
Bonus thought #½: Neither #1 nor #2 is even remotely original, but they need to be said more often. A dense city like New York has strengths that are very different from a spread-out city, and the street-design policies of the latter are actively wrong here.
