1915 Detroit Map Showing Present and Proposed Street System

[Detroitnerd]

Whoa. Can we write a People's History of Detroit?

[Retroit]

If you are able to keep the markets in a convienent geography people will have no reason to expand their market area, and will reinforce the pattern.

But the hexagonal pattern proposed by Christaller was not one hexagon [[like one giant Detroit) it was many hexagons [[like many smaller suburbs). The diagonal roads actually encourage sprawl because instead of a person having to travel 3 miles north and 4 miles west to get somewhere [[total of 7 miles), they can simply take the 5 mile diagonal.

I'm still hoping someone can explain how, with the use of this system, "it would have been much more difficult for Detroit to have declined and abandoned the way it was."

[Detroitnerd]

The diagonal roads actually encourage sprawl because instead of a person having to travel 3 miles north and 4 miles west to get somewhere [[total of 7 miles), they can simply take the 5 mile diagonal.

That presumes that everybody is driving everywhere. But in cities where everything you need for day-to-day life is located within a few blocks, you don't drive. And when you don't drive, you stop sprawl.

It's like how Lewis Mumford used to describe cities: Unlike the country, where you need to travel to get everything, in the city, everything is brought to you. With a wide range of goods and services in place, city residents don't NEED to travel much, certainly not much by car.

And the Woodward system, ungainly as it looks to us today, programmed as we are to drive on grids, puts special emphasis on placing the amenities of life as near as possible: Parks, markets, plazas, all linked by thoroughfares and progressively narrower streets as you get further into the triangles within the hexagons. I can see where new urbanist types would dig it.

[EastsideAl]

I'm not sure that a street plan like this helped Washington DC avoid decay, flight to the suburbs, terrible traffic, and sprawl. Washington has come back pretty strong from its terrible problems in recent years, but that seems much more a matter of economics than anything having to do with which way the streets run.

[Retroit]

Thanks, EastsideAl. I couldn't have said it better. My point exactly.

[MichMatters]

I'm not sure that a street plan like this helped Washington DC avoid decay, flight to the suburbs, terrible traffic, and sprawl. Washington has come back pretty strong from its terrible problems in recent years, but that seems much more a matter of economics than anything having to do with which way the streets run.

I'm talking specifically about prevention of huge swaths of urban prairies and entire square miles of abandonment. For as bad as cities like DC or St. Louis declined, the tight-knit layout makes it much harder to tear things down. It's a lot easier to tear down individual vacant single-family homes than it is to wait for an entire row of connected homes to empty out before you can really start demolishing.

For everything somewhere like St. Louis loss, it's infinitely easier to fill the city back in, today, than it ever will be to fill back in Detroit. And, it's already happening in The Lou. To put it more simply, it's going to take considerable less effort and time to fill back in the stuff inside the Grand Boulevard loop, than to have to try and build a walkable community out in say Brightmoor.

Historic, long-gridded, big-block, north/south grids were built for real estate developers to maximize profits with little to no consideration for the actual people that'd live there. Organic systems are built for people, first, before anything else.

[Retroit]

You present some interesting observations, but I still don't see how the triangular-trapezoidal-rhomboidal-hexagonal layout is better than the square-rectangular layout.

...the tight-knit layout makes it much harder to tear things down. It's a lot easier to tear down individual vacant single-family homes than it is to wait for an entire row of connected homes to empty out before you can really start demolishing.

But can't townhouses be built just as easily on a square grid as a triangular?

...it's infinitely easier to fill the city back in, today, than it ever will be to fill back in Detroit...it's going to take considerable less effort and time to fill back in the stuff inside the Grand Boulevard loop, than to have to try and build a walkable community out in say Brightmoor.

It that because there are more roads per square mile of area, thus less land available to build upon?

Historic, long-gridded, big-block, north/south grids were built for real estate developers to maximize profits with little to no consideration for the actual people that'd live there.

If the square grid is cheaper, how is it inconsiderate to the people that live there?

Organic systems are built for people, first, before anything else.

How is a "planned" triangular layout more "organic" than a simple logical square grid layout?

You may want to also consider the many cities that have a more rigid square grid than even Detroit. I don't think they are disadvantage by the square grid. Consider Manhattan [[almost entirely a square grid except the southern tip and Broadway), Chicago, Philadelphia, Toronto, etc. Come to think of it, I don't know of any American city that would support your claim. Boston?

[Detroitnerd]

I think the hex system never coexisted with sprawl, so it's hard to say with any certainty. It's not like we can point to a hex system built after 1920 and say, "See? This was built 'organically' and was never disinvested."

But I do think the mile-road grids were a big giveaway to developers, not necessarily the best way to lay out a city.

[Retroit]

I think the hex system never coexisted with sprawl, so it's hard to say with any certainty. It's not like we can point to a hex system built after 1920 and say, "See? This was built 'organically' and was never disinvested."

That's true. I don't think there is any city that is purely of any one type of "layout pattern", which causes me to wonder how a person can make the claim that a certain pattern would have prevented/encourage anything. And yet...

But I do think the mile-road grids were a big giveaway to developers, not necessarily the best way to lay out a city.

Is this because you think it would have been more difficult to build a triangular-hexagonal grid than square one? Or that it would have been harder to subdivide a triangle than a square?

I think you are overestimating the difficulty, and may not be taking into account that you may actually be wasting more space rather than utilizing it fully.

[Gistok]

Or it could result in the exact opposite as what happened in Detroit when the freeways were introduced.

I don't think you can compare freeways [[that spur absolutely no commercial development whatsoever), with broad avenues and large squares/circles that promote retail.

[EastsideAl]

You also have to take into account the different stages of development involved here. Both Washington and St. Louis were laid out and platted back in the early 19th century, very much under the influence of Paris. Basically the same as the Woodward plan in Detroit, except Detroit was really a small town at the time, and would remain a smallish city into the early 20th century. So those cities had townhouse development on narrow lots, with angular boulevards and plazas designed for carriage traffic and strolling.

By the time Detroit really burgeoned in the 1910s and 20s the model was quite different. Streets had already been laid out on grids in a "rational" American fashion, like New York's or Chicago's, and with wider lots. Midwest land was relatively cheap, so spaced out individual houses could be built, and between the rise of the automobile, and public transit by buses and electric streetcars, transportation was much faster and more efficient. The era of townhouse building in dense cities was over, because density of that sort was no longer necessary. Modern midwestern cities would look quite different from their older predecessors. With industrialization middle class and working people could now afford to own an individual house with land, which had only been possible for the wealthy before. And, increasingly, they could buy cars.

Essentially all of Detroit outside of the core was built during this era, and during the later boom that came with WWII. Most of the northwest and northeast sides of Detroit were built with automobile ownership and travel in mind, and were really built as early automotive suburbs [[although they were also served by streetcars and buses). This is in large measure what attracted people to buy those homes.

But all of these areas had walkable commercial strips. In that respect they were not much like today's suburbs. You cite Brightmoor, which despite being relatively poorer than nearby neighborhoods, had an active commercial strip along Fenkell into the 1970s. There were dozens of these strips around the city, really too many to name. Any kid who grew up in Detroit into the 1960s can probably remember walking to neighborhood stores on a nearby commercial strip, and being driven or taking the bus to larger stores nearby. But supermarkets, malls, big box stores, changes in American working and shopping patterns [[like women increasingly working outside the home and having their own cars to go from place to place) began to choke these areas off, as did the flight of people with money from these now older neighborhoods. This happened in pretty much every American city at about the same time, and is still going on today.

Other cities have come back from this though, at least in part. I cited Washington above as a good example. But it seems to me that the main difference between Detroit and those other cities is the extreme depopulation here. People left here in droves and were never fully replaced, whether by immigrants or young people and families wishing to live a more urban lifestyle. For the most part all that was left was the poor. There are a lot of reasons for this, and they've been discussed to death on this forum over the years, but the central one seems to me to be our constantly declining economy that simply did not attract a large enough number of people to the city.

So again, I'm not sure the street pattern of northwest Washington has made it anymore successful as an urban story than, say, the gridlike streets of the north side of Chicago or the very midwestern streets of Minneapolis. I very much enjoy cities like Washington, but when you're talking about what Detroit isn't in the light of older eastern cities and old river-transportation hubs like St. Louis, you're really comparing Detroit to a type of city it never has been and was not intended to be from its earliest period of large-scale growth.

[Detroitnerd]

Is this because you think it would have been more difficult to build a triangular-hexagonal grid than square one? Or that it would have been harder to subdivide a triangle than a square? I think you are overestimating the difficulty, and may not be taking into account that you may actually be wasting more space rather than utilizing it fully.

I believe it comes down to a question of scale. Developers want to make money using economies of scale. A small parcel for development isn't as lucrative as a large parcel for development. What the mile-road system did was give over very large areas to developers. Developers, in turn, wanting to maximize their profits by thinking big, left huge areas of residential development where the only way to do your shopping is by car. This is one of the reasons why major roads are so clogged in those areas. I believe many of those people on the road are simply trying to go distances as short as a quarter-mile, but must join the slow convoy to get there.

It is doubtful this gridlock would happen using Woodward's plan for smaller blocks, shaped with plenty of roads of varying widths, going in all directions. To get a loaf of bread, you would likely walk to the market. That takes much of the traffic off the roads, and can make for a much more appealing urban experience.

Of course, developers do not generally like developing small parcels: Not a whole lot of profit in it. But it wasn't always the case. The real estate atlas of Detroit has some pretty interesting examples that illustrate just how small the initial subdivisions were in Detroit. Fragments of farms, bits of original tracts, etc., were developed in small parcels into subs, usually with the nearby strips of commercial activity in mind.

Do hex-plans build up too much road? Well, yeah, there's a lot more roadway in, say, Washington, D.C. than in many other cities. Taking a page from Hausmann, the boulevards are insanely wide. But, to my mind, if a narrow street in a residential wedge carries mostly people, a slightly wider road along an axial carries small vehicles, and the thoroughfares carry the trucks and streetcars, there is a surprising respect for different modes of transit you don't see in mile-road areas. Especially human-scale activities: walking, biking, strolling.

Manhattan's grid is interesting in its uniformity. Where does it get that? It is oriented toward the ports, which, unfortunately, are long-gone as centers of commerce, and which makes uptown-downtown driving in Manhattan into such a headache.

But not all grids are alike. Let us remember that the mile-road system, in place across much of Michigan, is essentially a rural system for bypassing farms and getting goods to market in cities. Until the 1920s, few people would have thought of attempting to have a heavily populated area with access to a major thoroughfare spaced out as far as a half-mile.

[Retroit]

I believe it comes down to a question of scale.

Wouldn't a square of 1/2 square mile be better than triangle of 1 square mile? Would adding more commercial streets necessarily increase the number of businesses, or doesn't a certain given area only support a certain amount of businesses?

[PeachLaser]

Very Interesting. With the resolution of the drawing and the fading, etc., something that popped out to me was the symbolic nature of the design. Almost looks like some Masonic symbols in the design. Also very interesting seeing in the upper right-hand corner the complete symbolic design.