Opening the Street

I first heard about Atlanta Streets Alive when someone pasted a link on Facebook – North Highland was going to be closed from Virginia Avenue south for two miles on Sunday, May 20.  It sounded like it could be very disruptive for anyone needing to drive somewhere.  In retrospect, I can’t believe that that was my first reaction.  It may have had to do with the original information I saw, which made me think it was a bicycling event, or some vestigial memory of being pregnant in the 1990s, with a spring due date, back when Freaknik paralyzed traffic in much of the city for one weekend each spring, and Tom trying to figure out how we would get to Piedmont Hospital if Peachtree Road was impassible.  But I looked into it a little more, and it wasn’t just for bicycles, and it looked like fun.  So last Sunday afternoon Iain and I headed off for the North Highland and Virginia, with hats and sunscreen and water bottles.

We hadn't seen quite sure what to expect, but we had a great time.  We ended up walking all the way to the endpoint at Corley Street, near the Old Highland Bakery in Inman Park.  We saw people on bicycles in costume, people on unusual bicycles like the man riding the reproduction of an old bicycle with the very large front wheel and the small back wheel, and a napping cat strapped into an umbrella stroller.  There were musicians; my favorite were the percussionists, playing on overturned 5 gallon plastic buckets, and offering passersby and chance to join them, with pan lids to play, but the Seed & Feed Marching Band was playing near Manuel’s Tavern, and there were others too on sidewalks and in parking lots along the route.

There was lots of food.  The restaurants seemed to be doing a good business, and the ones with outdoor seating were pretty much full.  Some had set up tables to sell takeout, and there were food trucks and other vendors too.  We got lunch at a stand in the parking lot of the video rental place at Highland and North Avenue, and ice cream from the Westside Creamery truck, and popsicles from the King of Pops himself, in Inman Park. 

The Indie-pendent had a participatory art project – we painted something on the large canvas they had propped up against a retaining wall – and we cut pictures out of old children’s encyclopedias to make buttons outside Young Blood Gallery (they came out great --  that was really neat).  Story Corps was collecting very brief stories on Post It notes (“When did you fall in love for the first time?”  “What are you proudest of?”).  PEDS was asking people to put their foot in paint and leave a print on a roll of paper that they were going to deliver as a petition to the city, requesting that the sidewalks get fixed.  (I would have signed a petition, but I wasn’t going to take my shoe and sock off, almost three miles from home, and leave a paint footprint on a petition.  That just didn’t seem like a very good idea.)  I think it was the organizers who had a participatory exhibit entitled Pop-Up City Hall on how to improve the city.  But my favorite thing of the whole afternoon was Free Poems on Demand.  Two young men and a young woman were sitting on the sidewalk on folding chairs near Highland and North Avenue.  You could give them a topic, and then come back in a few minutes and get a poem, written just for you, on that topic.  As it turned out, demand was high and our poet had not gotten to the topic Iain had chosen by the time we finished lunch.  So we stopped by on our way back, and Iain collected his poem, and we dropped a dollar in the hat on the sidewalk.  (The poem, by the way, was worth waiting for, and we probably should have contributed more than a dollar.)

It was a great afternoon, but it was more than that.  The experience of walking the route really made me see the area differently.  It wouldn’t otherwise have occurred to me to walk from our house to Inman Park, but that’s what Iain and I did last Sunday afternoon.  It was about three miles, six miles round trip.  Realizing that in fact these distances are walkable (although maybe I won’t do it often) means that I probably will do it again sometime.  Honestly, that never had occurred to me.  And things look different from the perspective of the sidewalk (or walking down the middle of the street, where we were walking much of the time) than they do from behind the wheel of the car.  The event taught me that our intown neighborhoods are even more walkable than I thought they were, and just knowing that, I am more likely to do it.  (Where's that sidewalk petition?)

Atlanta Streets Alive wasn’t a big commercial festival like SummerFest for the Dogwood Festival.   A two-mile stretch of a street was mostly closed to vehicular traffic for the afternoon, and there were small scale, almost spontaneous activities and performances along the route.   Since last Sunday, I've learned a little more about the thinking behind events like Atlanta Streets Alive.  It's part of a movement of sorts to reclaim cities for people, through small scale changes in how people use space and interact with each other in the urban setting.  It’s called tactical urbanism.  According to Tactical Urbanism 2, “Improving the livability of our towns and cities commonly starts at the street, block, or building scale.  While larger scale efforts do have their place, incremental, small-scale improvements are increasingly seen as a way to stage more substantial investments.”  

The Atlanta Streets Alive project was – in tactical urbanism terms – an open street.  Open streets “temporarily provide safe spaces for walking, bicycling, skating and social activities; promote local economic development; and raise awareness about the detrimental effects of the automobile on urban living.”  I can’t say it better than the authors of Tactical Urbanism 2, so I am going to quote them at some length.

While the benefit of Open Streets initiatives are widely recognized, perhaps the most tangible benefit is the social interaction and activity that develops – thousands of people of all ages, incomes, occupations, religions, and races have the opportunity to meet in the public realm while sharing in physical or social activities.  In doing so, participants develop a wider understanding of their city, each other, and the potential for making streets friendlier for people.

The resulting vibrancy therefore enables people to experience their city’s public realm in a different way, which helps build broader political support for undertaking more permanent pedestrian, bicycle, and other livability improvements.  In this way, open streets are a tool for building social and political capital, while having a very real economic impacts for businesses, vendors, and organizations along the chosen route.

Last night we went to Caramba for dinner, and driving down North Highland I was pointing out to Tom and Caroline where we’d made the buttons, where we’d gotten a poem written to order, where we got our lunch.  I don’t see the street through the same eyes as I did before last Sunday, and I know I can walk to places that previously I would have never thought of walking.  And I'd still like that sidewalk petition.

On page 2 of Tactical Urbanism 2, there is a story about a “guerilla crosswalk” that was painted across a busy street in Baltimore; it has since become permanent, with an official, City of Baltimore-sanctioned crosswalk there.  I’m thinking that maybe we need one at Wessyngton and Cumberland.

Photo from Tactical Urbanism 2