Letter to the Internet (formerly to the Editor)

Here's a hot & spicy slice of Harangue Pie I cooked up for the Boston Globe yesterday, which I decided against hurling.

Is it really a pedestrian mall?

The 2009 AIA Twenty-five Year Award recognized Faneuil Hall’s success - vibrant pedestrian streets morning, noon and night, unmentioned in the recent article about abandoning the pedestrian mall at Downtown Crossing. Downtown Crossing's sidewalks are either hectic or abandoned, and always unwelcoming. Why? My anthropology professor identified ancient active districts by the number of doors per block. Faneuil is all doors - and no curbs. Downtown Crossing has big, blank walls and deep curbs. Sidewalks are jammed; nobody steps off the curb - call it what you like, Washington Street’s still shaped like a vehicular road. Maybe its written designation is “pedestrian mall”, but the message delivered by curbs, blank walls and unwelcoming sidewalks - "keep off; keep out; keep moving"- is, unfortunately, written in stone.

Sidewalks

I loved an article in the Globe's Ideas section today, as I frequently love articles in that section of the Globe. This one was about sidewalks - more like about a woman who is about sidewalks. Actually, it was about a woman who wrote a book about sidewalks, and I anticipate loving the book as I loved the article.

Sidewalks are the arteries and organs of urbanity and a thing much neglected in the public mind. Even our own fine walk-anywhere city finds its sidewalks squeezed and mutilated to accommodate vehicular traffic, presumably to support the irrational fantasy of parking in front of your destination. University of New Orleans' Renia Ehrenfeucht takes up their cause with UCLA's Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris in what promises to be a bright-eyed, broad-minded book, "Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space", out in May.