Curbside Chat: A candid talk about the future of America’s cities, towns and neighborhoods

by David High

For some, the term “smart growth” conjures some pretty bad images.  Big Government.  Lost Freedoms.  Obstructing the Free Market.  Opponents often (wrongly) imagine people forcibly deprived of their cars and living cheek by jowl in high density neighborhoods.  These ideas are anathema to the conservative values of Lancaster County.  But what if smart growth was shown to be the truly fiscally conservative path?

Next Wednesday at 2:00, Charles Marohn will make just this case during a Curbside Chat at the Manheim Township Public Library.    With his clearly presented numbers, Mr. Marohn will demonstrate that the pattern of growth of the past 60 years is actually a Ponzi scheme, and that scheme is now collapsing around us.

Lancaster County once prided itself on its fiscal savvy, but now our problems look like those of the larger world.  It would behoove us to listen to the words of Mr. Marohn.  You are invited to attend.

Background Buildings: A Great Lancaster City Asset

by David High

More than individual pieces of architecture, the ubiquitous rowhome defines the character of Lancaster City.

It’s no secret that Lancaster has some impressive architecture.  Central Market and the Stevens School Apartments are iconic elements that come to mind when we think of the city.  But they are not the buildings that form the character of the city.  What defines Lancaster, arguably, are the more common structures that line our streets.

Architects and planners use the terms “object” and “background” to differentiate between these types of buildings.  The Griest Building is perhaps our most identifiable object building.  Until recently it stood alone, marking the city’s center.  Our background buildings are easy to identify.  They are the row homes, shops and warehouses that form the “walls” of our most character defining public spaces: our streets.

Musser Park is defined by ordinary, well kept rowhomes.

Object buildings often (but not always) play off against a public space.  Consider how McCaskey High School sits behind  green space,  or the AMTRAK station terminates  North Queen Street.   These prominent locations emphasize an object building’s civic importance.  Background buildings form public spaces.  Our residential blocks are a great example, but also consider how ordinary row homes define Musser Park, one of the best public spaces in the city.

It’s easy to see the allure of object buildings.  Many architects come from schools that focus on the design of object buildings.  Architects can also see a unique design as an opportunity to make a name for their firm.  Cities often try to reproduce the “Bilboa Effect”,  and some clients don’t want to pay for the expense of an architect only to produce a “normal” building.

Historic East Side Suites
photo: Jeremy Hess Photographers

But Lancaster needs to invest in background buildings.  It’s important to remember that background buildings aren’t boring.  They can express individuality while fitting into the larger context.  In Meeder Development Corporation’s Historic East Side Suites, we see beautiful, confident buildings that don’t need to compete with the Watt & Shand facade or the Excelsior building .  Landis Communities’ Steeple  View Lofts and Garden Spot Village’s Press Building warehouse conversions demonstrate the appeal of simple, well designed buildings that were never intended to be eye-grabbing architecture.

Background is not rote: The stairs and curved wall in this N. Queen St. rowhouse are unique, but the home still helps form the block.

It’s in this vein that we can compare buildings to people.  There are people we admire for their rare beauty, poise, talent or intelligence.  That admiration is good.  But these remarkable qualities do not devalue the rest of us “ordinary folks” who form a community.  Just as ordinary people who are comfortable in their own skin make us comfortable, so does a coherent “background” make a comfortable city.  Lancaster has produced some remarkable people and buildings, but our real strength lies in the solidly ordinary.

No Two Ways About It

by David High

Jeff Hawkes got it right.  Almost.  In his May 1 column, Hawkes calls out the auto-centric thinking that values cars over people in Lancaster’s streets.

So why the “almost”?  Hawkes states that lobbying has given “machine-encased” people more rights than “machine-unencumbered” people.  And at first blush, he’s right.  It seems that cars do have a preferred status on Lancaster’s streets.  But cars don’t have more rights than pedestrians or bicyclists.  In fact, the PA Vehicle Code suggests that cars have more responsibilities.

But I shouldn’t quibble about details.  As Hawkes points out, the perception that cars have more rights is created by a transportation infrastructure that favors them.  This infrastructure, in turn, actually encourages the behavior that the laws prohibit.  For example, the curb to curb width of many of Lancaster’s main streets have a “design speed” much higher than posted limits.  To state it simply, the design of our roads and streets do not agree with the laws that govern them.

Two-way streets are part of a design strategy that works with, not against, the laws.  They are part of the larger concept of “complete streets”: streets designed equitably for motor vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians.  Intuitively, we know that oncoming traffic is far more compelling than a posted limit in reducing speed.  We can observe this first hand by comparing West Orange Street, which is one-way, to the neighborhood feel of two-way West Lemon Street.

Beyond traffic calming, two-way streets have benefits for the larger city.  They reduce the “drive around the block” required for parking or missed turns.  They are more intuitive, especially for visitors.  And they can help businesses in struggling neighborhoods by catching commuters on both their inbound and outbound trips.

Traffic engineers have a relatively straightforward task of moving as many vehicles as quickly as possible.  In Lancaster and other functioning cities, this MO is forced into a street grid that was built so that worthier denizens (the people!) could walk comfortably to their destination.  We have, largely without question, given these spaces over to automobile traffic.  Thank you, Jeff Hawkes, for taking the first step of questioning the status quo.

Mayer Farmstead Position Paper

by dladvocacy

The following statement is Design-Lancaster’s position on the proposed development of the Mayer Farmstead (also known as Belmont) in Manheim Township.  This statement follows Design-Lancaster’s September 2011 letter to MT zoning and planning officials.  It was written by David High and Eugene Aleci with significant input from other members of Design-Lancaster.

The historic Mayer Farmstead (also known as ‘Belmont’) on the Fruitville Pike is an important and much loved reminder of Lancaster County’s agricultural heritage.  We are concerned about the seeming lack of cooperation in appropriate reuse planning and transfer of ownership for this site in the context of the larger real estate development.

For over a decade, the Preservation Trust has expressed concerns for the future of the site to the property owners and the Township.  It has advocated that this extraordinary complex of buildings should be carefully treated in any future development scenario.   For several years, property owners and real estate interests have been working out development intentions for the site.  These interests have had little or no direct communication with stakeholders, and we are all affected by this lack of community engagement.  The eventual outcome of the built environment in the immediate area is reaching the tipping point, and the loss of one of Lancaster County’s and Pennsylvania’s most significant historic farmsteads now seems inevitable, unless positions converge toward communication and co-operation.

Developers seem intent on proceeding with their plans, developed with little input from the community.  Preservation interests and many citizens who care about the site have assumed for far too long that when development pressure comes along, the site’s obvious historic and architectural significance would persuade both hearts and minds of all concerned that these buildings must be protected and reused in any development scenario.  Existing Township laws regarding demolition are better than most in our county, but they still only require review and consultation with the Trust for properties only of the highest category of architectural significance.  These laws are not enough to require developers and property owners to protect older buildings from demolition – indeed, through an absence of normal building maintenance, the Mayer Farmstead is currently quite clearly displaying years of “demolition through neglect”.

A two day design workshop and forum has been proposed and funded by Livable Communities, Inc., the local Preservation Trust, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and others, to work towards a series of win-win solutions for all involved, by bringing the developers, land-owners and Township officials together with preservation, smart growth development interests and local design professionals at a community design forum.  This effort would be a critical step in doing the right thing for the property, the developers, the Township, and the regional community.  Because the design professionals involved intend that their contributed services be taken seriously, the developers must also agree to be a participant, if a real, economically viable alternative to historic resource demolition is to be found.  So far, this has not happened.

For ten months, the developers and property owners have refused to openly discuss or participate in such a forum.  Their resistance seems based on a belief and, no doubt, on their lawyers’ advice, that eventually their legal rights will force the Township to allow them to demolish, pave over and build new whatever they have decided makes economic sense to them, with no need for any community discussion.  In fact, the laws we have in place now will allow this; most land use and development laws in PA and across the US are inflected in favor of development to give land development interests rights to do almost anything they intend with their property, with only peripheral regulations to be addressed before public approvals must be granted.

In the absence of real laws to compel developers’ co-operation, the citizens are left only with community influence over their elected officials and private development interests.  This farmstead complex, even in its current deteriorating condition, remains an outstanding assemblage of surviving American agricultural architecture; if it were to be retained and reused, it would keep alive an important reminder of the world-renowned agricultural heritage of Lancaster County while serving as a distinctive address for new occupants.

An objective opinion poll would probably indicate that most would favor retaining as much of the farmstead complex as possible. In such cases, however, developers are usually confident that the threat of legal action and the lure of big future revenues to the Township will matter more to decision-makers than their citizens’ concern for retaining old buildings.

By refusing to participate in this “win-win” effort, the developers and land-owners are effectively assuring the worst possible outcome for all.  The developers’ current proposal will produce a poor aesthetic and will damage the remaining sense place and community in the area.  This outcome could well be less profitable than might be produced with a more open design approach.

A well-designed plan could benefit the Township, the owner and the larger community.  Design-Lancaster strongly encourages the Township to take advantage of the valuable resource that the Preservation Trust has prepared. The Township could do this by encouraging the development team’s active participation in the design workshop as a means to help plan a more successful blending of old and new features at the Mayer Farmstead.

Propose “right-sizing” of the US Postal Service fits suburban models but not urban models

by whittledf

About 80 city residents and business people attended a public meeting Wednesday evening (November 2) to hear and comment on a presentation by representatives of the US Postal Service regarding a study underway to determine whether the Lancaster Downtown Post Office should be closed.
According to the Postal Service presenters, “As more customers choose to conduct their postal business online, on their smart phones and at their favorite shopping destinations, the need for the U.S. Postal Service to maintain its nearly 32,000 retail offices — the largest retail network in the country — diminishes. To that end, the U.S. Postal Service is taking the next step in right-sizing its expansive retail network by conducting studies of approximately 3,700 retail offices to determine customer needs.”
In addition to the Downtown Lancaster “retail post office facility” on the list of 3,700, over 200 more facilities are being studied for possible closure. The bulk of those on the list are suburban and rural facilities such as Drumore and Talmage but not Smoketown or Narvon. Others not on the list in Lancaster County include suburban facilities at Greenfield, Witmer. Across PennsylvaniaDowntown Lancaster is accompanied by other “urban” postal facilities like Philadelphia’s 30th Street Train Station, Manayunk, and Germantown.
A few commenters at the Lancaster public meeting let it be known that the postal service served the poor and downtrodden without automobiles or transit available to meet their postal needs. More spoke as if they were new urbanists or trained city planners instead of sociologists and ministers to the poor.
They spoke of the post office as a necessary part of a city – in the same category as a court house, a downtown church, a city hall, a market, or the jail. A city post office contributes to overall walkability as suggested by Lancaster Mayor Rick Gray.
The postal service presenters were cordial and cheerful but offered little promise that Downtown Lancaster would retain its post office. Following the official USPS news releases issued throughout the summer, “So we are taking the next step in right-sizing our retail network by studying approximately 3,700 retail offices to determine customer needs. As part of this study, we are introducing a retail-replacement option –– Village Post Offices –– as an option for affected communities. Village Post Offices would be operated by local businesses, such as pharmacies, grocery stores and other appropriate retailers, and would offer popular postal products and services such as stamps and flat-rate packaging.” See http://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/ for more news from USPS.

Old School

by David High

By David High

One of the greatest joys of my life these days is the 15 minute walk with my daughter to Fulton Elementary School.  A mere block from where her great-grandmother attended the Stevens School for Girls (now an apartment building), Genevieve’s school experience is far removed from earlier generations.

The radically different technology, curricula and teaching methods would, to some, justify a wholly different physical structure for today’s schools.  Yet these rapid changes are precisely why I’m glad my daughter attends a school like Fulton.  With uncertainty in the future, these institutions help us remember where we came from.

I am not referring to architectural style.  While the traditional form of the Fulton and Stevens Schools lends itself to enduring places, contemporary styles can still nurture human development.  The Art Deco style of McCaskey – it must have been a bold statement in 1938 – marries modernity with timeless placemaking.

Debates over facilities costs are nothing new.  At the turn of the last century, the cost of the Stevens School was a hot topic. Given Lancaster County’s reputation for thrift, I think it’s fair to ask why our ancestors invested so heavily in these structures.

I think past generations left us a message in their buildings.  Their investment was actually in the students.  In contrast to many modern schools which often resemble prisons, the Fulton and Stevens schools embodied the larger community’s high expectations for students: we invested in this building because we intend for you to do great things.

The famous architect Frank Gehry stated that “Life is chaotic, dangerous and inspiring. Buildings should reflect it.”  I agree wholeheartedly with the first half of that statement.   Life is chaotic.  We should build structures to cling to in that chaos.

Instead of Gehry’s quote, we should heed Winston Churchill’s famous maxim, uttered as he stood on the ruins of the House of Commons.  “We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.”  Gehry offers gamey egotism. Churchill gives us a warning.  If our school architecture continues to scramble after changing technology instead of enduring spaces that ground, instruct and edify, we will raise a generation even more lost in cyber space.

Designing for the Market: The Next Generation of Housing and Communities

by David High

by Mary L. Frey

To create better communities, design must respond to changing market, economic, demographic, and lifestyle trends.

Lancaster County is 20 years into the implementation of its comprehensive Growth Management Plan — Balance. We are now confronted by challenges in many facets of our personal lives, as well as in our communities, which are changing how we live and do business. Finances, housing, employment, education, transportation, and energy are on everyone’s mind. There is great uncertainty as we look toward the future.

These changes, however, are an opportunity to improve the way our communities develop and function.

You can see the impact of changing market forces on your community every day.  You recognize that the development and change that you see and are a part of could be so much better than what you often have to settle for. How can you more effectively influence what results from the hard work and professional talent of our planners, designers, and developers?

The Lancaster County Planning Commission has been focusing its educational efforts on community design over the past couple of years. We are looking to ratchet up those efforts during the remainder of 2011 and 2012.  We want to increase our focus on current and future housing market demand, redevelopment, revitalization, reinvestment, suburban retrofit, and transportation corridor improvement. And while doing this we want to make a strong design response to market, economic, demographic, lifestyle, and design trends.

In order to accomplish this, LCPC is kicking off its 2011/2012 Envision Lancaster County Educational Series of Events on October 26^th by hosting, in partnership with the Lancaster County Coalition for Smart Growth, John Norquist, President and CEO, the Congress for the New Urbanism and former Mayor of Milwaukee, WI as our keynote speaker. Please join us on Wednesday, October 26th at 6:30 p.m. at the Lancaster County Farm and Home Center for his presentation of It’s a New World: Let’s Rediscover, Rethink, and Redefine our Communities.

John will share his insight on the market forces affecting housing and community design. He will present new ideas about development, redevelopment, and revitalization, land use codes, education, and problem solving by using New Urbanist principles. His focus will be on a design response to changing market, economic, demographic, lifestyle, and design trends.

There will be additional events in this series featuring both national and local experts in the fields of housing, real estate, and community development during November and again in early 2012. You have great ideas to offer. We would like to hear them. Plan to attend.

Lancaster’s Third Place

by David High

By David High

If one ever doubts Lancaster’s worthiness of the title “city”, they need look no further than its most popular coffee shops as justification.  These urbane environments are great for meeting friends or reading the house copy of the New York Times.  Compared to the do-it-yourself feel of some of Lancaster’s coffee houses from the 90’s, our current offerings have a high level of fit and finish.  As Prince Street Café owner Crystal Weaver once mentioned to me, “hiring a design professional was one of the best business decisions I made.”

Now that I walk my daughter across town to school, I’ve added Chestnut Hill Café to my list of haunts. It was here that I recently had an “a-ha” moment, a realization about how this café’s character is shaped by its location.  During this visit I stumbled upon a good friend, busily preparing a speech on his laptop.  That morning I had been carrying the burdens of the economic climate.  The chance meeting started a discussion about my friend’s speech, and for a few minutes I forgot my concerns.  I left the cafe that morning with a lighter load.

Lancaster Countians are people of schedules.  Of course we schedule our business meetings, church affairs, bake sales and Cub Scouts. But we also schedule our social lives to an inordinate degree.  We will schedule to meet a friend for coffee at Barnes and Noble, but how often do we spontaneously head to the local cafe with the confidence we’ll find conversation? Such acts of  bohemianism clash with our industrious nature.

The serendipity described in the chance meeting of my friend isn’t actually serendipitous at all.  It is occurs under certain conditions that allow for authentic and natural discourse.  In his influential book The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg describes these as “third places”.  After home (first) and work (second), third places are essential for truly healthy communities.  Third places have nearly disappeared from the American landscape through zoning and commercialization.

Prince Street Café, from where I’m writing this post, is great for informal meetings, working or a quick bite before the Fulton.  Likewise, Square One and La Dolce Vita inject a vitality into the first two blocks of North Duke Street.  All three are assets to the city, and their longevity testifies to a community need being met.  Lancaster used to churn through cafes, some lasting only a few months.  But as I look around Prince Street this afternoon, I see the planned meeting of friends, many arriving by car from outside the city. None of these three cafes are located in solidly residential neighborhoods with a supply of locals to wander in.

For this reason Chestnut Hill Cafe is an anomaly.  Sitting squarely in a residential neighborhood, it is surrounded by homes that supply “regulars” arriving on foot.  These regulars in turn greet each other with friendly banter. Conversations go beyond pleasantries and a promise to catch up at a later date.  Sure, some meet for business and some to work alone.  But in its young life Chestnut Hill Cafe has become an authentic third place.  We would do well to create the conditions for more to follow.

For and by the people

by Tashya Dalen

By Tashya Dalen

Alexis De Tocqueville warned in the mid-19^th century that American individualism would eventually drive us to retreat from public life.

“Each person, withdrawn into himself, behaves as though he is a stranger to the destiny of all the others. His children and his good friends constitute for him the whole of the human species. As for his transactions with his fellow citizens, he may mix among them, but he sees them not; he touches them, but does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone. And if on these terms there remains in his mind a sense of family, there no longer remains a sense of society.” [1]

The concepts of transparency and participation, combined to form one of the five principles Design-Lancaster advocates for, have the potential to work against such a social malaise, encouraging civic engagement while also helping to create more usable and valued places in our landscape. At the same time, this type of democratic process is not instantly realizable.  David Brain, sociologist at the New College of Florida insightfully reflects,

“Designers and planners generally need to work with a more sophisticated understanding of the conditions and possibilities of democratic politics. We need to get past the naïve notion of democracy that makes us think that a process becomes more democratic simply by including more people in the meetings. In practical terms, communities need to build civic capacity around an understanding of the complex forms of human settlement, not simply as the reflex of market activity or the unintended consequence of regulatory policy, but as a clear and purposeful reflection of a democratically constructed vision. Designers and planners need to face up to the political challenge implied in such a goal.” [2]

The argument for transparency and participation in design rests on a growing body of research that began in earnest in the mid-20^th century especially as it relates to public space.

Central Park, 1962, W. Whyte

Jane Jacobs, freelance writer turned urban activist in response to modernism’s autocratic urban planning, argued for these principles in her classic work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). A few years later, William Whyte conceived of the Street Life Project, spending 16 years observing and documenting human behavior in public space throughout New York City. He published his findings in, The Social Life of Small Public Spaces (1980), reasoning that in as much as city-dwellers were instrumental in enlivening and inhabiting urban spaces, they should also be instrumental in making design decisions in the neighborhoods they know so well.

Jacobs and Whyte inspired the founding of the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) in 1975, a non-profit planning, design and educational organization that among other things has coined the term placemaking as:

“a multi-faceted approach to the planning, design and management of public spaces. . . looking at, listening to, and asking questions of the people who live, work and play in a particular space, to discover their needs and aspirations. This information is then used to create a common vision for that place.”

The diagram below is one of the tools PPS uses to guide communities through this process. The inner circle describes the four key attributes of a place. The middle ring represents intangible, experiential qualities, and the outer lists measurable factors related to each attribute.

Place Diagram, PPS

One nearby example of transparency, participation and the rise of civic engagement can be seen in Philadelphia’s “Civic Vision for the Central Delaware” developed by PennPraxis and the William Penn Foundation.

Within the course of a year, they formed an Advisory Group, led Riverfront Walks, held Community Forums, a Design Workshop and conducted further collaboration and outreach.  Though there is still much work to be done to realize the recommended design concepts, Harris Steinberg of PennPraxis has found that the Vision “provides a framework for growth that can help [them] find common ground.”

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[1] Democracy in America, 2^nd volume, 1840.

[2] Democracy and Urban Design: The Transect as Civic Renewal, Places, vol 18:1, 2006, p. 18.

Urban Design: Keeping Lancaster Special

by David High

By Eugene Aleci

Without a map of where we really want to go, we’re unlikely to end up where we really want to be.

Any downtown is a delicate eco-system of finance, businesses, livability, and functionality.  Especially in smaller cities like ours, the demand for new space is a delicate creature.  To always defer to the “market” as if any and every new investment will save us and never damage us, is to ignore history’s many examples.  The “market” will usually commit to a project development direction for primarily financial reasons.  Sometimes downtowns benefit, but quite often they get hammered by unintended, even unconsidered consequences, through actions taken by both public initiatives and “the market”: Lancaster Square and the former YMCA at Queen and Frederick, are a few examples.

In 1923, placing the brand new Griest Building “skyscraper” with extensive “modern” office space on the same block as the aging Victorian-era Woolworth Building, eventually contributed to our loss of Woolworth’s “palace of commerce.” First, the new offices drew tenants away, and increasing vacancy led to decline; then a fire on upper floors, and the Woolworth, with its domed towers and roof terraces, was demolished about 50 years after opening.  A “5&10 store” replaced it; no great addition to the city architecturally, but at least an active use.  The Griest Building — however, was high-quality architecture as a replacement office facility.  Losing the old can sometimes be worth it, IF (big, bold “if”) the city gets new architectural and urban development quality
of equal or added value in the new design and construction.

This happened with the Griest building, but is it the case with the new parking garage at Queen and Chestnut?  Better than a surface parking lot, yes.  But what really could have gone there, on such a valuable, pivotal corner that was just a parking lot
for so long?  We never really explored this, and we should have before we let anything get built there that we’ll have to live with for the next 50-100 years.

To direct development, rather than just letting it happen to us, we must take pro-active design steps years ahead of project proposals that will come from “the market.” We must establish some agreed-upon basics about the sort of PLACE we WANT our downtown to be.

Absent advance planning on our part, “the market” will continue to decide what it thinks it can build, and project sponsors will expect the city to simply accept and approve their plans, time and time again: the new CVS replacing the National Register-listed
historic tobacco warehouse at Prince and Lemon is another case in point.  Although the building was on the National Register, our city would not tell that owner or CVS that we would not permit that complex to be demolished.  With no city development agenda or a set of planning and urban design parameters, project proponents will decide on their own what to build and where.  Hospitals, colleges, banks and others have all served up development plans which they’ve developed from their own perspectives.  Without any considered alternatives to suggest or any development standards in place beforehand, the city has always been unable to advocate for anything different than what’s been proposed.

Without some basic design and development parameters in place, we will not influence “the market” to produce anything more or different than the safe, the short-term, and the predictable —usually, this has meant demolishing the old and building the least costly new structure possible.  Look around downtown at what we’ve created by relying solely on “the market” to re-design the center of our community for the past 40 years, and largely this is what you’ll see.  With a few bright exceptions of well-adapted older structures and one or two new buildings, we have built architecture that largely detracts from our local sense of place and character, instead of adding real value to it.

With some well-informed and co-ordinated design forethought, we could do a LOT better.  Charleston, SC is a good example of doing it better; so is Annapolis; so is Bellefonte, PA; and Doylestown, PA.

This type of advance planning and urban design is not unknown or impossible to do, Lancaster just hasn’t taken it on yet; and each year we defer, we lose more and more of the character that makes the City of Lancaster someplace special.

For the good of our future quality of life (and this is important investment and property-value advice as well as architectural and community advice), we should be working on this NOW — it is still not too late, but we’re getting there!  And, there are many of us who have the skills and knowledge needed to help, if we would only be asked by those in charge, and then also listened to with care and concern for the community’s future.