Jul 15, 2010 4

Urbanism Field Trip – Bastille on Bishop in Oak Cliff

By: Kevin Buchanan

Here’s a detour from Fort Worth coverage – took a field trip to the Bastille Day street festival in Oak Cliff’s Bishop Arts District to see how they did with a real, close-the-street-and-have-a-party street festival type event.  It seems planners were expecting around 300 people to come, but more like 1,000 showed up.  It was popular, in other words.

Bishop was closed for a couple of blocks in the heart of the district.  One portion was lined with tents for the mussel cooking competition that would be held later in the evening.  There were also wine-related events, and of course the many and varied merchants of the Bishop Arts District were participating as well.

At this end of the street, parking for bicycles and scooters was set up:

There were plenty of both, especially bikes (which spilled out across the rest of the Bishop Arts District as the parking area filled up).

The event was filled with, as our friends at Walkable DFW pointed out, Texans doing exactly what some people would have you believe Texans would never do – walking, riding bikes, socializing, and playing in an urban public setting, even when it’s hot.

Build spaces for people, and watch as people come from all over to use them thanks to our shortage of great places designed around human beings.

Outside of the core festival area, the sidewalks were bustling with life.

In the second half of the festival area, the street had been taken over by games.  One end held a biggie-sized chess board, while the rest of the space featured a dirt bocce ball field.

Bikes & bocce ball – always a fun combination for photos.

Crowds were impressive, and I’m betting the businesses were loving it – they were all packed.

Lovely cruisers parked at the other end of the street.

The view down the festival.

The always-tasty Eno’s was packed to the rafters with activity.

It was an impressive showing, and a big congratulations go to Oak Cliff organizers and activists for creating such a wonderful street festival.

It’s definitely the sort of thing we’d love to see in Fort Worth more often – more intimate and grassroots than the events around here tend to be.  The Bishop Arts District is a great example of a maturing Urban Village, with a variety of housing and retail destinations in a human-scaled, human-oriented form.

Jul 9, 2010 14

Councilmembers Clash Over Streetcar

By: Kevin Buchanan

Incredibly, after the news yesterday that Fort Worth won $25 million from the Urban Circulator grant it applied for with the Federal Transit Administration, there are already forces at City Hall desiring to put the brakes on the enthusiasm and support for the project again, and possibly even tell the FTA “no thanks” on its grant award.

The Star-Telegram has a story that heavily quotes District 6 councilmember Jungus Jordan (in fact, last night when the story was published, Jordan was the only official referenced – it’s since been updated with quotes from District 9′s Joel Burns and State Senator Wendy Davis) saying that the streetcar simply isn’t a priority for the city, that there are still too many unanswered questions, that Tower 55 and I-35 are more important, etc. etc. etc.

“We have a multitude of priorities,” Jordan said. “Our top transportation priority is Tower 55, the crossroads of the rail movement throughout our city. The other top priority is [Interstate 35W].”

Tower 55 is important, no doubt.  It’s also a problem that will take billions upon billions, and literally decades, to solve (not to mention a lot of debate about how to solve it).  While there are some short-term improvements that can be made, it’s important to note that:

  • Streetcar funding likely won’t come from the same places as Tower 55 money, and
  • Things like the FTA grant CAN’T be used for Tower 55 anyway.

It’s a repeat of the same talk from when Jordan and Zim Zimmerman tried to stop the streetcar study from happening in the first place – efforts which a lot of you out there helped to derail thanks to your calls and e-mails to City Hall.

As for I-35 – in the year 2010, when we’re dealing with horrible air quality, sprawl consuming land on the outskirts of town and causing the city to spend obscene amounts of money on infrastructure on the fringe to support it, health concerns, concerns about car dependence, oil dependence, and more, an era when young professionals and creatives are looking for cities with vibrant central cores and progressive transit more and more than tract homes and strip malls, I find it pretty revealing that Jordan wants to go on record as saying I-35 is a top priority.  It’s complete business-as-usual in an era when business-as-usual (which got us all the problems above) has pretty well died.

In fact, that sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it?  It’s almost as if Mayor Mike Moncrief said the exact same thing during his State of the City address:

Commuter Rail, street cars, and other alternative modes of transportation also remain a priority for me and this City Council. Unfortunately, Fort Worth and other major metropolitan areas are finding out the hard way what a mistake it was to design and build cities around automobiles years ago. Friends, we cannot continue to focus solely on building more roads for more vehicles. That’s counter productive at best.
Business as usual is dead!
North Texas requires a transportation overhaul. No more band-aides, no more patches—a complete overhaul!

Yet, here we are, five months later, and Jungus Jordan is saying business-as-usual is a higher priority than a modern transit system.  Who exactly is calling the shots down at City Hall?  It’s clear that remaking our transportation system into something more livable, sustainable, and beneficial for the city is a priority with Mayor Moncrief, so what’s with the flip-flopping from City Hall?

Now, it should be said, Councilmember Jordan has also stated before that commuter rail is a higher priority, because without it, the streetcar wouldn’t succeed.  I agree that commuter rail is important for the city (it’d be a bit more meaningful if we weren’t also widening Interstates and building new sprawl, traffic, and pollution-generating toll roads to Southwest Fort Worth for crazy amounts of money, though).

However.

Commuter rail won’t be the determining success of the streetcar project.  If anything, it’s the commuter rail that won’t be really successful without a modern, efficient, and attractive local neighborhood rail transit system.  The flaw in Jordan’s thinking is looking at the streetcar project as solely a transportation project, when it has other benefits (some likely even greater than its transportation benefits) far beyond transportation.  The streetcar isn’t only a transportation tool – it’s an economic development tool as well (in addition to more nebulous but still very real benefits like neighborhood pride, street life, community fabric, etc.).

The central city is Fort Worth’s economic engine.  It may only be a small portion of the land in this sprawling city, but it is massively critical to Fort Worth’s livelihood and economy.  It contains our two largest employment centers (Downtown and the Near Southside), our deeply meaningful cultural facilities of all sizes (everything from the Kimbell, Carter, Modern, and the like to Bass Hall to Arts Fifth Avenue to Stage West and beyond), and infrastructure designed to support a wide variety of transportation methods.  It generates huge amounts of tax revenue that helps pay for parks, street maintenance, police, and more.  The central city is how we compete economically with our peer cities across the country for new investment and, these days, new up-and-coming residents who are looking not only for work, but for dynamic and interesting cities apart from the usual tract-homes-and-chain-stores world.

Streetcars have proven time and again to be powerful catalysts for central city growth, able to attract, and shape, new development in central city areas.  This isn’t just our love of Portland, Oregon talking (although Portland’s seen $2.8 billion in added value thanks to their streetcar system).  For just a few examples – Tampa’s streetcar has generated $1.1 billion in new development.  Little Rock has seen $700 million in new value brought to their city.  Even Kenosha, Wisconsin has seen $174 million in new value.

And the development the streetcar attracts is a lot healthier for the city than the development a new toll road or a wider I-35 will attract.  It’s development in compact central city locations that allow people to get around without adding to the road congestion or air quality problems of the city, as well as development that doesn’t cost the city an arm and a leg to pay for new infrastructure in far-flung areas to support it.

That’s the other key to the streetcar’s economic impact – it doesn’t just attract new stuff.  It helps shape that new stuff into a more livable and sustainable form.  Like most American cities, Fort Worth gutted much of its central city for parking, wide roads, and freeways.  We’ve made better progress than some cities with our Downtown revitalization in the form of Sundance Square, but the Basses have still kept it pretty well solely dependent upon people driving in, parking, visiting, then leaving.  We have a smaller Downtown residential population than many cities of comparable (or even smaller) size across the United States.  Other districts have made a lot of progress, but the central city is still choked in its potential by its dependence on the car.  It costs money to build that parking, and it takes up land we should be using instead for new development (bringing new jobs, new residents, and new economic benefits) and new public amenities like, oh, say, a Sundance Square public plaza.

Did you know that a single structured parking space (meaning a space in a garage) tends to cost at bare minimum $10,000?  Usually in the central city, this figure is much higher – $20,000, $25,000, or more per parking space.  A space to stick your car for the day is just stupidly expensive.  That parking helps choke the potential of the central city.  If you’re looking at living in the central city, developers are passing that parking cost on to you.  Provide a parking space or two for every condo and apartment, and suddenly you’ve priced out a lot of people who would really love to live somewhere that would let them walk to a lot of stuff, ride their bike, and just generally get around without driving.  You’ve also sucked up a lot of space to store cars, space that could instead be earning its developers money and providing new destinations for residents, workers, and visitors.

The T and City Hall have talked about our commuter rail projects a lot, and even show in the station renderings areas for “transit-oriented development.”  I’m sorry, but if we’re really expecting much TOD from our commuter rail, we’re living in a fantasy world.  A commuter train that runs by ever half-hour to hour (or worse) at limited times of the day isn’t going to do a damned thing except generate parking lots at the stations.  Commuter rail is definitely needed, don’t get me wrong – but it’s still yet another way for us to simply shuttle people into and out of Downtown Fort Worth as quickly as possible.  It’s the transit equivalent of a big fat Interstate or arterial street.

No, not everybody wants to live in the central city, and that’s fine – but a lot of people would like to, more than a lot of Fort Worth politicians probably realize.  If we’re going to be competing on the national stage in the 21st century, simply building more ways to get people in and out of the central city isn’t enough.  In some ways, it’s just more business as usual – which, Mayor Moncrief would like to remind you, is dead.

We have to get more serious about creating a healthy, livable series of neighborhoods in the central city, making it a cohesive place rather than just a set of tourist districts and office towers.  That’s the sort of thing that is attracting the leaders and businesses of tomorrow in this day and age.  We’re seeing it all across the country.  The streetcar is a key component of doing just that.  It helps shape development into forms that aren’t so car dependent, opening up central city living for new ranges of people, driving new jobs and residences, and more.  It does so in ways that simply improving our bus system could never hope to do – while we need a better bus system, it’s not a substitute for the permanence and ease-of-use of a central city streetcar that would attract far more riders and attract development and investment along the route.  Buses are never going to do that.

And for the people who don’t want to live in the central city, the streetcar’s development impacts will create more reasons for them to want to take those pretty new commuter trains into town to visit and spend money.

It needs to be said – we can’t keep up the same-old business as usual small-town Cowtown dog and pony show anymore.  We’re a major city, and it’s time we put our big boy pants on and started behaving like it.  If we’re actually serious about building a Fort Worth for the 21st century, one that competes in the economies of this new world, we can’t just simply concentrate on the Southwest Parkway, widening I-35, and building a new commuter train to shuffle people out of the central city.  We’ve got to do better.  The arrival of the railroads put Fort Worth on the map, and I truly believe the streetcar will be another legacy project far more monumental in the future than an I-35 widening could ever hope to be.  It’s something that will generate huge benefits for us long term.  It’ll be giving back when our grandkids are running things.  All you’re hearing about these days is Fort Worth’s budget problem, but here we have the opportunity to make an investment that will give back to this city in incredible ways, and some people at City Hall are ready to just give up.

An opportunity, by the way, that the Feds are virtually screaming at us that we should take.  Over 80 cities are planning modern streetcar systems, but do you know how many have actually had funding commitments from US DOT to help?  It’s an extremely small list – you could count it on your hands, in fact.  Fort Worth has been put on an extremely exclusive and deeply meaningful short list of places that can be leaders in remaking our nation with more livable neighborhoods and less dependence on oil (that’s kind of a big deal – there’s that thing going on in the Gulf, for example, that you might have heard about), a position that will mean Fort Worth is generating buzz across the country, but rather than take the lead we’ve got government officials ready to take a nap.  We’ve waffled on this enough, and we’re going to be a national embarrassment at the US DOT if we keep it up.

(And I should add that based on what I understand about this FTA grant – which admittedly could be wrong – Fort Worth’s “accepting” the money is basically a formality, and the money is already committed.)

We need to let HDR finish their study, and we need to then let them do the third phase of their study (expect that to be the controversy later this year).  To already be talking about stopping before they’ve even finished is just irresponsible.  I’m convinced that that’s where Jordan is heading – he’s setting up excuses to kill the third phase of HDR’s study at the end of the year, things like “budget” and “Tower 55″ and the like.

Understand that this isn’t anything personal towards Jungus Jordan.  I don’t know the guy.  I’m sure if I met him at a bar he’d be fun to chat with.  Hell, I disagreed with Chuck Silcox nearly every time he opened his mouth, but he was still a good guy.

I’m just floored by the staggering lack of leadership and lack of vision coming from City Hall.  We’ve had opportunity knocking on our door for a while for something that will have tremendous benefits for our city’s future, we’ve had extensive work done for years and years on planning this thing, we’ve had support from the mayor, council members, and the public, and now we’ve got Uncle Sam himself virtually pounding on the door to help, yet we hem and haw and do nothing while we get happy about widening an Interstate that’ll just put more crap in our air and more cars on our roads.  If we’re really this freaked by our budget problems, why are some people so eager to slam the door on an opportunity to invest in something that will let our city reap so much economic benefit?  If you’ve got budget problems, you can either trim things to the bone, or you can earn more.  Rather than closing our swimming pools and cutting back at our libraries then dumping so much onto business-as-usual transportation projects, how about we think forward and invest in something that’ll help us prosper our way out of this situation?

(II don’t believe we’ve ever turned down Federal transportation money before.  Certainly not for road projects – even when the result is the disaster that is Rosedale in the Near Southside and East Side, for example, we took the money, knowing that we’d be undoing much of what it paid for in the future.)

I should say that it’s not a total lack of leadership and vision.  District 9 councilmember Joel Burns certainly gets it:

“We can’t afford not to take advantage of this incredible return on investment,” he said. “Fort Worth needs a modern streetcar system. This potential investment from the federal government acknowledges our effort to create jobs, have a cleaner environment and have a more livable Fort Worth.”

As Burns points out later in the same article, it’s not likely that the streetcar project will take any money from the city’s general fund, since there are other sources like TIF districts and Public Improvement Districts and more.

Count State Senator Wendy Davis on board as well:

“Given the growth of this region and the limited funds for our transportation needs, we have to be smarter about how we develop and supplement our transportation infrastructures,” she said in a news release. “This is something I’ve supported for a long time — a way to connect walkable, sustainable communities with a transportation mode that does not add more vehicles to an already congested road system.”

As Mayor Moncrief said, business as usual is dead.  Let’s see if we can’t do something about that, huh?  This is Fort Worth – we’re supposed to be pioneers, right?  That’s what the “Cowboys and Culture” thing is built upon.

Let’s also remember this survey, conducted by the ETC Institute for the City of Fort Worth last year:

The streetcar project is the third highest supported project in the survey, and has the most “very supportive” votes of any project.  Had the project been listed as what it actually is – a central city streetcar rather than just a Downtown streetcar – I wager it might have even been more supported.

It’s just another piece of info that shows that this project isn’t just something being talked about by random doofus bloggers like me and urban planners – there’s a not insignificant amount of the citizenry who are really enthused about this, as well.  This is becoming a movement.  It’s the sort of thing that people who want to be mayor in the future might do well to not try and stamp out.  The new Fort Worth is speaking.

I didn’t expect it to be necessary again so soon, but you know what?  Why don’t you write to every single council member and the Mayor and tell them exactly what you think?  I know the “Fort Worth Way” isn’t to stir the pot, but the Fort Worth Way is failing us.  Tell them how much you support the streetcar project and what it means for Fort Worth’s future.  Tell them you’re tired of more business-as-usual and the lack of vision from City Hall.  There’s no vote coming up any time soon, but Fort Worth’s City Council needs to know that people are paying attention even when they’re not voting.  Here’s that contact info again – don’t limit yourself to just your own councilmember.  Let them all know.  (And be ready to let them all know again later this year.)  E-mail is cheap:

Mayor – Mike Moncrief – 817-392-6118 –mike.moncrief@fortworthgov.org
Mayor Pro Tem – District 4 – Danny Scarth – 817-392-6187 –District4@fortworthgov.org
District 2 – Sal Espino –  817-392-8802 –District2@fortworthgov.org
District 3 – Zim Zimmerman – 817-392-8803 -District3@fortworthgov.org
District 5 – Frank Moss – 817-392-8805 –District5@fortworthgov.org
District 6 – Jungus Jordan – 817-392-8806 –District6@fortworthgov.org
District 7 – Carter Burdette – 817-392-8807 –District7@fortworthgov.org
District 8 – Kathleen Hicks – 817-392-8808 –District8@fortworthgov.org
District 9 – Joel Burns – 817-392-8809 – District9@fortworthgov.org

And while you’re at it, how about you tell the Star-Telegram how you feel as well?  They’re the big paper in town.  Let them know the streetcar project is important.  I hope a lot of you take the time to send things to the Star-Telegram:

Letter policy

Submit via e-mail: letters@star-telegram.com

Mail: Box 1870, Fort Worth, TX 76101

Fax: 817-390-7688

Verification: Letters must include printed full name, address and day and home phone numbers for author verification purposes only.

Frequency: Writers are limited to one letter every 30 days.

Content: Must be the author’s original words. Suggested length is 200 words or less. Letters may be edited for space, clarity, civility and accuracy.

Questions: Call 817-390-7599 or contact Jill “J.R.” Labbe, Editorial Page Director

Cheers & Jeers policy

Submit via e-mail: letters@star-telegram.com

Mail: Box 1870, Fort Worth, TX 76101

Fax: 817-390-7688

Please limit your Cheer or Jeer to about 50 words. Full name, address and daytime telephone number are required. There are some restrictions on subjects. Items may be edited.

Questions: Call 817-390-7599 or contact Jill “J.R.” Labbe, Editorial Page Director

Apr 21, 2010 4

Oak Cliff’s Guerilla Complete Streets Event, “The Better Block”

By: Kevin Buchanan

We just have to spread the word a little more about this cool project that fellow Complete Streets/traditional urbanism advocates in Oak Cliff put on a couple of weeks ago.  Go Oak Cliff did “The Better Block,” their own “guerilla” Complete Streets makeover of Tyler Street in X+, on their own using neighborhood supporters.  Armed with about a thousand dollars and some ingenuity, they significantly narrowed the street to slow car traffic speeds, created a protected bike lane buffered from traffic by parking and striping, opened some temporary shops in vacant storefronts, set up sidewalk cafes, and more.

The end result was a street that was massively more pleasant to be on – people walked and dined in what is usually car space, bikes easily rolled past, traffic speeds were dramatically slower creating a much safer place to be, and benefits to local businesses from creating a street as calm, inviting “place” for everybody rather than a car sewer were noticeable – for example, local book store Cliff Notes had their best sales day ever on the first day of the event.

The project showed the benefits to the neighborhood from taming traffic speeds and expanding the amount of space for pedestrians, sidewalk diners, cyclists, and more, and it’s getting much local and national coverage.  The video above comes from Go Oak Cliff themselves.  Here’s a few links to other stories about the event:

The Better Block Wrap-Up - Go Oak Cliff

Emergent Urbanism in Oak Cliff – WALKABLE Dallas-Fort Worth

In Dallas, A Community Transforms A Street – Streetsblog

Guerilla Urbanism:  North Oak Cliff Residents Create Their Own Complete Street – Bike Friendly Oak Cliff

Feb 18, 2010 Comments Off

Free Movie Tonight at Urban Green Build – “Blueprint America: Road to the Future”

By: Kevin Buchanan

Urban Green Build‘s free urbanism & sustainability movie series returns tonight after a snow delay last week.  Up for viewing is PBS’s Blueprint America:  Road to the Future.

Blueprint America: Road to the Future, an original documentary part of a PBS multi-platform series on the country’s aging and changing infrastructure, goes to three very different American cities — Denver, New York and Portland, and their surrounding suburbs — to look at each as an example of the challenges and possibilities the country faces as citizens, local and federal officials, and planners struggle to manage a growing America with innovative transportation and sustainable land use policies.

Fort Worthology is helping out by providing the film, and we’re looking forward to another great, educational free movie night.  Given all the news here in Fort Worth recently about the Bike Fort Worth plan and the modern streetcar plan, the subjects covered in “Blueprint America:  Road to the Future” could not be more timely.  The film’s segments include:

  • Efforts by the town of Golden, Colorado to stop a freeway from coming through their traditional “Main Street” town
  • A look at Portland, Oregon’s bicycle infrastructure, modern streetcar, MAX light rail, aerial tram, pedestrian infrastructure, land use policies (both the good and bad that results from said policies), and more
  • A look at what New York City’s new Department of Transportation director, Janette Sadik-Khan, is doing to reverse decades of auto-oriented infrastructure in NYC and create spaces oriented to people and bicycles
  • A discussion with United States Department of Transportation director Ray LaHood on what must be done to radically shift transportation and planning in the United States

Stop by Urban Green Build, located at 1244 College Avenue in the Near Southside (the building at the corner of College & Magnolia, above the police station next to Mamma Mia, second floor, across from The Salon Upstairs) tonight at 7:00 PM for the latest in this ongoing series of urbanism & sustainability films.  To get there:  Urban Green Build is an easy walk from pretty much anywhere in Magnolia Village and Fairmount.  By bike, Magnolia Avenue has dedicated bike lanes and several sharrow’d bike routes feed into it – 6th Avenue, 5th Avenue, Jennings Avenue.  Most of the other cross streets are easily bikeable as well.  There’s a standard city “lollipop” bike rack in front of the building, on Magnolia in front of the police station.  By transit, the #4 bus goes right by on Magnolia, the #1S bus stops at Hemphill & Magnolia just a short walk away, and the #6 bus stops at 8th Avenue & Magnolia for a walk down Magnolia from the west.  Parking is available on street and in a small lot next to the building.

Jan 14, 2010 2

Portland: A Passion for Sustainability, Tonight at Urban Green Build

By: Kevin Buchanan

Just a reminder – Urban Green Build at 1244 College Avenue (2nd floor at College & Magnolia, above the police station and Mamma Mia, across the hall from the Salon Upstairs) will be showing Portland:  A Passion for Sustainability, tonight at 7:00 PM.  See how Portland, Oregon has adopted strong frameworks to create a sustainable city.

The film starts at 7:00, and is free.  It’s also BYOB, if you’re so inclined.

Oct 28, 2009 4

Lawrence Halprin, Heritage Park Designer, Dies

By: Kevin Buchanan

Landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, one of the most creative voices in designing urban public space, passed away on Sunday at his home in California at the age of 93 from complications from a fall.

Halprin was a prolific designer, and created some of the most unique modernist public spaces in the United States. He studied how the human body moves and behaves in spatial settings, especially using dancers and choreography thanks to his wife and longtime collaborator Anna, who was a dancer. This sense of poetic movement found its way into his work, which exhibits strong relationships to human scale. Halprin devised his own landscape drawing system, which he called “motation” (motion and notation).

Several of Halprin’s projects have been demolished over time, and several more are in states of disrepair.

We have personally experienced two of Halprin’s designs, one of which is in dire condition and the other is gloriously restored and beloved. Of course, the one in disrepair is also the one Halprin did here in Fort Worth: Heritage Park, on the Trinity River bluff in Downtown.

All of Halprin’s designs reflect this passion to give people as many options as possible to go this way or that, to reverse directions, to pause, to start over, to be alone, to meet others, and to experience as many different sights, smells and sounds as the site permits.”

–Benjamin Forgey, The Smithsonian, 1988

Heritage Park’s quiet, meditative spaces and interplay of paths and “rooms” are classic Halprin. It’s not too difficult to imagine, as you walk through the park, how engaging it all would be if it were fully restored and taken care of by the city, rather than closed, dried-up, and left to decay and be overtaken by out-of-control landscaping. We were fortunate enough to make our first visits to Heritage Park before it was closed, and even in its run-down condition it felt very special. At one point, the city hired Carter + Burgess to come up with a plan to restore the park, and their response was to destroy the park’s character and integrity by slathering it with railings and other incompatible design features that were in complete opposition to Halprin’s lifelong intent of direct engagement between visitors and his works. Fortunately, Downtown Fort Worth, Inc. and other interested parties are now leading the way with a fundraising effort to carry out a restoration of Heritage Park that is sensitive to Halprin’s design, thanks to a collaboration with Laurie Olin, fellow landscape architect and friend of Halprin’s.

We’ve written a lot about Heritage Park in the past, and here are a few selections, including our three-park exclusive look at Halprin’s original design sketches of Heritage Park and the Trinity waterfront:

Heritage Park, “Insulted and Humiliated” – July 2008
An Update on Heritage Park – February 2009
Heritage Park now slightly less closed – August 2009
Designing Heritage Park: Inside the Halrpin Archives, Part One: Alternate Sites and Designs
Designing Heritage Park: Inside the Halprin Archives, Part Two: Oddities Along the River, Leonard’s Subway Extension, and More
Designing Heritage Park: Inside the Halprin Archives, Part Three: The Design Comes Together

As you advance towards the water in the collecting pools, you might wonder if you can trust you own sense of privilege, if you’re really allowed to do this. Trail your fingers in the fast flow up top, perch wet or dry atop the falls, wade barefoot into the bottom, or climb. You’re operating in that wonderful audio cocoon-bubble of privacy created by the loud rushing water, behind or maybe inside that wall of sound, so you feel alone and brave. Eventually you give yourself permission. Or you don’t. You decide how brave you want to get, or not. It’s a detail, but many have commented on that moment.

–Walt Lockley

The other Halprin design we have personal experience with is one that’s been well-loved: the Ira Keller Fountain in downtown Portland, Oregon. The Ira Keller Fountain creates an inviting space in the heart of the city that’s both playful and peaceful, depending on your mood. It’s a remarkable space in that there are no safety railings or nanny-safety-devices to prevent you from exploring the space. As we wrote about the fountain in our post about visiting it:

That’s it. There’s nothing stopping you from dipping a toe in, running your hands along the falls, wading around the pads. It is the kind of public space we simply don’t do anymore. The restoration and ongoing use of Ira Keller Fountain is in direct opposition to the blandified, watered-down world of railings that Carter + Burgess recommended for Heritage Park, which is even less arguably dangerous than the Keller Fountain. Keller has kept its interactivity and its soul, and that little bit of mostly-imagined danger that, as Lockley says, lets you “decide how brave you want to get, or not.”

The Ira Keller Fountain is an outstanding example of Halprin’s brilliance, and because it’s been respectfully cared for it’s a real direct, undiluted experience. Because the city hasn’t cordoned off the fountain and interfered with Halprin’s intent, the simple act of visiting it is also an act of engaging in a conversation with Halprin, as your body and mind respond to the subtle cues and design touches that he used to guide your procession through the space.

It’s that the verbal message of those signs is so effectively contradicted and drowned out by the bravery, openness, good sense and loud sexiness of the water, that’s the best part. There are no railings or fences. The place is untamed and attractively dangerous, like the natural world.

–Walt Lockley

Coming from another urban area (Oakland-Berkeley) a number of years ago my first reaction to Ira’s Fountain was slack-jawed disbelief. The thing most striking to me was its absence. Where were the signs saying ‘keep out,’ ‘danger’, ‘caution’, ‘no swimming’? There were no warnings or precautions visible. Did the lawyers know about this? How do they pay the liability? I was charmed, impressed and fell totally in love with the city of Portland at that point. Charmed that they cared enough to give over this energy and space to a non-revenue generator… To this day, many years since, I would name either the Salmon Street Springs or Ira’s Fountain as my favorite spots in the entire city. It is the joy factor of watching people interacting with the water. The kids especially are surprised that it is O.K. to go in. They look around as they approach the fountain, half-expecting someone to yell, ‘Stop, don’t touch that!’

–Barbara Duncan

So today, we celebrate the work and talent of Lawrence Halprin, master of designing spaces for human-scaled interaction. We are fortunate in Fort Worth to have an example of his work in our city, and hopefully soon we will all be able to enjoy it again, the way he intended us to.

Rest in peace, Mr. Halprin. And thank you.

Sep 22, 2009 10

Visiting DART's Green Line

By: Kevin Buchanan

We recently took at trip to Dallas to check out the first phase of DART’s new Green Line, the latest expansion to their light rail network. It’s instructive to see what other cities are doing with their rail transit operations, and since we don’t really have any in Fort Worth to take photos of yet, we figured it’d be nice to get some shots of the Green Line.

We hopped on board the Trinity Railway Express to head over. Along the way, we enjoyed the new, faster TRE experience. Even with the addition of Victory Station as a full-time stop, the trip to Dallas takes less time than before. By our clock, we made it from the Intermodal Transportation Center in Downtown Fort Worth to Victory Station in Dallas in just under 50 minutes.

When we got off at Victory, we found a Green Line train waiting on us. The Green Line uses the newest generation of DART’s SLRV trains, featuring a middle section with low floor for better accessibility.

Currently, the Green Line runs between Victory and MLK, Jr. Station, but when complete it will stretch from Carrollton to Buckner.

The actual experience of riding the Green Line is no different from that of riding any of DART’s other light rail trains, or any other modern rail transit system like a contemporary streetcar: smooth, comfortable, and quiet. Here, we’re heading into Downtown Dallas. In Downtown, the Green Line runs on the same alignment and uses the same stops as the Red and Blue Lines. A second Downtown alignment, called D2, has not yet been built.

It is undeniably impressive, if you’re of the same sort of transit mindset as this site, to see the amount of traffic in Downtown Dallas. Here, a Red Line train runs in front of our Green Line train.

Here, the Green Line passes through the West End.

We decided to first get off at the new Fair Park Station.

Fair Park Station is very impressive. It’s situated directly in front of the main gates at Fair Park. State Fair fans, this is your new dream come true. The Green Line allows you to bypass the experience of driving to and parking at Fair Park entirely. It is very well executed.

DART chose to be respectful of Fair Park’s gorgeous Art Deco architecture, and created a light rail station that blends in perfectly. The design of the station matches the Art Deco style of the park itself, from the fluted columns to the golden lettering.

We hopped back on-board and headed back toward Downtown to check out the next station along the line, Baylor Medical Center.

The “Baylor” station is indeed close to Baylor Medical Center, accessed from the station across a spacious art plaza. More to the point, Baylor Station is actually also a part of Deep Ellum (or at least, it seemed that way to us), giving Deep Ellum two stations on the Green Line.

Directly adjacent to the train platforms is an impressive new mixed-use structure called the Ambrose, seen above. The Ambrose features apartments on its upper floors, and retail spaces along the length of the DART station. A great example of Transit-Oriented Development (of the sort we’d like to see along the Fort Worth Streetcar). We checked out the coffee shop in the Ambrose next to the station, It’s A Grind, before heading out to walk through Deep Ellum and check out the formal Deep Ellum Station.

Public art is a major component of the Green Line stations. At Baylor Station, the columns feature medical-themed art.

After eating lunch at the All Good Cafe, we headed to the formal Deep Ellum Station. The art at Deep Ellum Station is very fun, featuring tall humanoid sculptures and small chrome birds that double as seats. They resemble smaller, bird-themed versions of the giant chrome Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago.

The largest sculptures at Deep Ellum Station are a series of pieces called The Traveling Man. These giant humanoid sculptures take various places near the station – one nearby is reclined, playing a guitar. The tallest is this one, right next to the train platforms. We really liked The Traveling Man. He’s got a smile on his face and a sense of happy charm about him. It definitely serves as an instantly-recognizable landmark for the area.

On the other side of Deep Ellum Station is this new mural. We have to say, more public art should feature the visage of RoboCop.

In all, the first segment of the Green Line is impressive, and should help spur more development in the areas it passes through. A big congrats to Dallas on its latest rail venture – hopefully it won’t be too long before our streetcar starts rolling here in Fort Worth (Fort Worth and Dallas recently jointly applied for funding for both of their modern streetcar systems).

May 29, 2009 5

Fort Worthology goes to Portland, Part Six: Small-Scale Infill

By: Kevin Buchanan

In today’s Portland post, we’ll be looking at some small-scale infill buildings that caught our eye.

Here in Fort Worth, we’ve seen our fair share of large-scall infill, like the developments along West 7th – large buildings on multiple blocks in a very “planned” sort of fashion. What we haven’t seen a lot of yet are the smaller-scaled infill developments that help to add variety and interest to the street.

What we have seen of smaller infill has been primarily on the Near Southside. There’s Joe Frank’s J. D. Moore Building at Henderson & Magnolia, TMA Architects‘ developments like the Dalal Professional Building at Jennings & Rosedale, Pennsylvania Lofts, and Oleander Plaza, the Fairmount Lofts, and similar things of that nature. Small-scale infill has been slowly gathering momentum in Fort Worth, but in Portland it’s a pretty regular thing.

A good example is the building here, the Burnside Rocket.

Designed by Kevin Cavanaugh, the Burnside Rocket is a mixed-use infill project on East Burnside, on the border between Southeast and Northeast Portland. The Burnside Rocket features a cafe on the ground floor, shared office space for creative professionals on the middle floors, and high-end restaurant Noble Rot on the top floor. Built on a 3,800 square foot lot, the building has 16,500 square feet of space and outdoor terraces on each level.

The building features operable window shutters covered with art by local artists from the surrounding neighborhoods. The shutters provide climate control as well as livening up the street with expressions by the local artists that painted them.

Another view of the Rocket’s art shutters.

The Rocket has no parking for cars, but it does provide several secure bike parking areas for tenants, as well as bike parking for visitors.

Tenants enjoy thoroughly modern spaces. Metal ductwork isn’t used for heating and cooling – hollow-core concrete floors are used to distribute heated or cooled air through the building.

Here’s a view inside the ground-floor cafe space.

And here’s the top-floor restaurant’s terrace.

The building features a rooftop garden, growing food for the restaurant.

Similarly interesting infill projects can be seen throughout Portland. This metal & stucco building is home to, among other things, Microcosm Publishing.

This new mixed-use loft/retail building on Hawthorne helps fill out the streetscape.

Most of the new infill in Portland is of a very contemporary style – but even I have to admit, it works. Modern architecture in Portland tends to be more interesting, more urban, and more friendly than the modern stuff we see in this region.

Take this building, the Belmont Street Lofts. It’s a great example of how architects in Portland use interesting materials, like this hardwood, to make their modern designs more warm and inviting. In addition, while being quite contemporary, few of the projects disobey the rules of good urbanism, and tend to fit in quite well with their surroundings.

Just down the street, this development features lofts over a full Zupan’s grocery store.

Here, a series of buildings adds apartments over retail space to the North Mississippi neighborhood.

This building features lofts over retail and a plaza space on North Mississippi.

Back on East Burnside, old meets new as the Burnside 6 building nears completion.

Burnside 6 features condos above ground-floor retail space, and a design that is quite striking to say the least.

Here, the Clinton Street condos make an interesting use of Cor-Ten steel on the facade – that’s the kind of steel that ages, the same material used to make the “Vortex” sculpture in front of the Modern here in Fort Worth.

As Fort Worth’s own neighborhood revelopment momentum builds, we expect to see more small, neighborhood-scaled infill taking place. Already, we’re hearing of more such buildings in the planning in the Near Southside, and from what we’re seeing of renderings and such (which we can’t quite post yet), Fort Worth’s own architects and small developers are starting to open up a bit and try some more interesting small buildings, architecturally speaking. These examples (and more – we didn’t seen nearly all of Portland’s small infill) serve to show what’s possible with developments on just a few, or even a single, building lot.

May 27, 2009 8

Fort Worthology goes to Portland, Part Five: Food Carts

By: Kevin Buchanan

In today’s post on Portland, Oregon from a Fort Worth-based urbanism perspective, we’re taking a look at one of the smaller pieces of Portland urbanism, but one which we thought was pretty cool indeed:

Food carts.

Yes, the humble food cart. We’re sure some of you are questioning our sanity at this point – what’s so great about food carts, after all? Well, plenty is great about them.

Food carts appear all around Portland – in Downtown as well as the surrounding neighborhoods and districts. What’s so great about them is the way they’re used. Often, the food carts are clustered along the edges of parking lots and other under-used plots of land. What would normally be a deadening influence on street activity is transformed by these little carts into a perfectly urban and vibrant place.

The food carts are, essentially, “instant urbanism,” helping to enliven the area around what would otherwise be blight, like parking lots. They serve inexpensive, tasty food from all manner of genres.

There’s even a blog, Food Carts Portland, which serves as a guide and review center. Just reading down the list of genres on Food Carts Portland, one can see the sheer variety in the city’s food cart universe: everything from BBQ to Bosnian, Cheese Steaks to Czech, Pizza to Polish, Venezuelan to Vegan, and everything in between. (One we regret not being able to try was Potato Champion, which is – seriously – a late-night French fry cart in SE Portland serving vegan poutine. How could you not love that?)

We tried various options while in Portland. Here, we’re looking at Shelly’s Honkin’ Huge Burritos, a Portland landmark in Pioneer Courthouse Square. She has been serving up fresh-made, ridiculously tasty burritos to lines of devoted patrons in the square since the early ’90s.

Shelly’s burritos do, indeed, deserve the moniker “Honkin’ Huge.” Look at that above – then realize that Shelly offers three sizes of burritos, and those are the small ones. There’s still Medium and Honkin’ Huge above that.

Best of all, Shelly’s burritos are vegetarian, and can be made vegan (which are cheaper still). What’s in a Honkin’ Huge Burrito? Food Carts Portland has the rundown:

A Honkin’ Huge Burrito features a grilled flour tortilla with refried pinto beans, fresh Spanish rice, cheddar cheese, guacamole, romaine lettuce, tomato salsa, and sour cream/or yogurt. There is usually an additional fresh salsa you can add if you choose. Do you see how simple that is? At first glance, many wonder – where’s the meat? Honestly, you don’t need it. An HH burrito will fill you and your small family up with leftovers. Seriously, I ordered a large once and had it for 3 days. I always order a small and still it is too much and I like to eat!

Should you ever find yourself in Portland, Shelly’s is a destination you must try.

“Ample portions” is something you often see at Portland’s food carts. For example, the Pad Thai from this little Thai cart:

These food carts are a simple, but wonderful, piece of real urbanism. They give people options for food and help add liveliness to the street, helping to negate the effects of things like parking lots and the like. We’re a bit curious as to why these sort of things have never sprung up in urban Fort Worth – is there some city regulation that discourages them? Why there aren’t a dozen food carts around the various parking lots in Downtown or the vacant lots on Magnolia (for just a couple of examples), we’re not sure, but they’d be a great addition to our own urban environment. Simple, inexpensive ways to add urbanism until large development does so. They also add life to parks and plazas, as Shelly’s at Pioneer Courthouse Square so perfectly illustrates – it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have a food cart or three in the long-planned Sundance Square plaza, for example.

May 26, 2009 6

Fort Worthology goes to Portland, Part Four: Parks, Plazas, and Squares

By: Kevin Buchanan

Taking another look at Portland from an urbanism perspective, and following up from last week’s post on the Ira Keller Fountain, today we’ll be examining some of the other parks and plazas in urban Portland.

Urban public space is another thing that Portland seems to take pretty seriously. As you wander through the city, it sometimes seems like every turn brings you into a park or plaza of some sort. Within the Downtown/Pearl District portion of the central city alone there are no fewer than sixteen parks. Some are multiple blocks, some are a single block – there’s even Mill End Park, the smallest park in the world: a circle two feet across, created by journalist Dick Fagan in the late ’40s.

Far from being mindless “open space” or “green space,” Portland’s urban parks, plazas, and squares show deliberate planning, programming, and design that makes them memorable places to be and gives people a reason to visit them. We’ll be taking a look at several of these places here.

Jamison Square is located in the heart of the Pearl District, nestled between streetcar lines on two sides and surrounded by a flock of mixed-use buildings. It consists of a central space made up of a water feature with terraced waterfalls spilling into a shallow depression, a grassy tree-lined space on the west edge facing one of the streetcar lines, a fine-textured gravelly space on the other streetcar line beside a wide wooden sidewalk, and a hard plaza space with benches and tables adjoining the mixed-use buildings fronting it to the north.

Jamison Square seems to be the Pearl’s “living room.” It is always active, attracting a wide variety of users – singles, couples, and families (lots of kids – they love playing in and around the waterfalls). It is designed to be interactive – you can climb atop the falls and sit right in the middle, dry but just inches above the flowing water. You can walk around, or take a seat on a bench or on the grass. You can even kick off your shoes and wade in – there’s nothing preventing anybody from getting right in the water or sitting in the falls.

As is appropriate to its status as the district’s central gathering place, Jamison Square isn’t just a patch of green – it’s fully activated by its surrounding buildings. Ground-floor retail rings the square, giving constant activity. Buildings on the north side actually front the square directly, with no roadway between them. As a result, restaurants and coffee shops in these buildings have created spacious outdoor dining areas opening out directly into the square.

That’s why design and programming are important – in an urban setting such as the Pearl (or Downtown Fort Worth, or the Cultural District, or the Near Southside), a simple “open space” or “green space” isn’t enough. The space must be activated by mixed uses like retail, restaurant, and residential facing it directly, and it must be designed in such a way as to reenforce its definition of space and create an attraction for visitors beyond simply being a place where there aren’t any buildings.

Jamison Square was a favorite of ours, because it just felt “right.” It was comfortable, inviting, and felt like the center of the surrounding neighborhood’s activities. It had the feel of a great urban square – that of a comfy outdoor room.

For the public art fans, Jamison Square featured several pieces. On the east side was this sculpture.

Along the west side, this series of totems passes by Jamison Square.

A couple of blocks from Jamison Square is the Pearl’s other major public space, Tanner Springs Park. Besides being another piece of public space for the surrounding developments, Tanner Springs Park serves another function – the recreation of the sort of environment that existed here before the city was built.

Tanner Springs Park features a recreation of a tide pool, to give a glimpse into the natural environment of the Pearl long before the land was settled. As the city’s Parks and Recreation Department puts it:

What is now known as the Pearl District was once a wetland and lake fed by streams that flowed down from the nearby hills in southwest Portland. These wooded hillsides provided a natural filter for the streams, cleansing the water as it made its way to the Willamette River. The springs from Tanner Creek, named for the tannery built by pioneer Daniel Lownsdale in the 1860s, flowed into the shallow basin of Couch Lake, now the area surrounding Tanner Springs Park. As the population of Portland grew in the late 19th century, Tanner Creek was rerouted through an underground system of pipes to the Willamette River. The lake and the surrounding wetland were eventually filled to make way for warehouses and rail yards which in turn were replaced by residences, shops, and public spaces.

You never know exactly what you might see – one evening, we spotted this duck taking a swim through the tide pool.

Tanner Springs Park features a couple of major sections. It starts with this gently sloping area, where a more manicured section slowly gives way to a naturalistic area as water works its way down the slope to the tide pool.

The slope leads down to the tide pool at the eastern end of the park.

In the tide pool, this blocky walkway weaves back and forth through the water around various plants. Separating the lower-level tide pool from the sidewalk is an undulating fence of what looks like old railroad steel, inset with blue glass art of insects.

Tanner Springs Park is, like Jamison Square, also surrounded by active uses and the streetcar lines. In contrast to Jamison Square, Tanner Springs is a calmer, more meditative space. The two parks, located so close together but so different in character, create an interesting interplay of life and activity.

One often finds parks in Portland form a system over a larger area, and the Pearl’s parks are no different. Jamison Square and Tanner Springs Park will be joined by another park shortly.

To the north of Tanner Springs Park will be The Fields, a new park that is another contrast to the two existing parks. The Fields will be larger at 3 acres, and be more of an open, spacious park than the smaller squares of Jamison and Tanner Springs. Each serves a purpose, and each compliments the others.

In addition, some streets in the Pearl have been closed to cars and converted to these beautiful, tree-lined pedestrian streets, lined with buildings.

To the east of the Pearl, in the Old Town/Chinatown district, one can find the beautiful Portland Classical Chinese Garden.

To the south, Downtown Portland has more great examples of urban public spaces. There’s the South Park Blocks, for example, featuring a long series of skinny blocks that form a continuous strip of park in the center of Downtown.

There are the series of ’70s fountain parks like the Ira Keller Fountain we looked at last week, as well as Pettygrove Park (above) and Lovejoy Park.

There are spaces adjacent to civil buildings, such as this square across from Portland City Hall.

The Downtown space that Portland is perhaps best known for, though, is undoubtedly Pioneer Courthouse Square, named one of the finest public spaces in the country by the Project for Public Spaces.

Pioneer Courthouse Square has been called “Portland’s Living Room,” and it’s easy to see why. The square is a hotbed of activity, and attracts people into its brick terraces and plazas to sit, talk, read, and have a bite to eat.

Pioneer Courthouse Square is activated with retail around the perimeter – the square is surrounded by stores such as Nordstrom and Macy’s and is right down the street a block from Pioneer Place, a major urban mall (we’ll talk about Pioneer Place in a later post – it’s successful in all the ways the Tandy Center wasn’t: it enhances rather than deadens street life, it maintains rather than destroys the street grid, etc.).

The square is also a stop on the MAX light rail line.

Pioneer Courthouse Square is one of the locations in Downtown Portland that one can find inexpensive food carts like these. We’ll talk about Portland’s food carts in another post, but for now Pioneer Courthouse Square attracts many diners to its food cars, especially the famed Shelly’s Honkin’ Huge Burritos.

The square is not just one, but several outdoor rooms, each well-defined and attractive to different sorts of activity, such as the dining areas on the upper level near the food carts, looking out over terraced steps and the central plaza.

There’s even now a TV studio in the square.

Naturally, there is public art – this sculpture of a businessman with an umbrella is a fixture in the square.

It’s exactly this sort of multi-use, attractive, lively public space which Downtown Fort Worth has lacked for a very long time. This is the sort of place we hope the long-awaited Sundance Square Plaza, which will replace the two parking lots currently blighting the heart of our most active Downtown environment, will be: a great outdoor “living room” public space for the city to gather and interact.

In addition to squares and plazas, Downtown Portland also has a waterfront park. This is Governor Tom McCall Waterfront Park, running along Downtown/Old Town/Chinatown’s waterfront on the west bank of the Willamette River.

Waterfront Park serves as an important lesson in urban planning: it was created on the former site of a freeway. As Wikipedia puts it:

In 1968, Governor Tom McCall initiated a task force to study the feasibility of replacing Harbor Drive with open park space. Removal of Harbor Drive began in 1974, and work progressed until the dedication of the park in 1978. The park gained instant popularity, and in 1984 it was renamed Governor Tom McCall Waterfront Park.

So, Portland got rid of a freeway, and created a beloved public space for everybody to enjoy.

Waterfront Park is a beautiful stretch of waterfront public space, and forms an integral link in bicycle traffic in the city as well. In addition, it serves as the home of a segment of the Portland Saturday Market, a festival held each weekend with local artisans & crafters, music, and food. Think Main Street Arts Festival, except with a greater emphasis on local talent and held each week rather than once a year. We’ll write more about the Saturday Market in another post.

This fountain plaza occupies a site in Waterfront Park.

Waterfront Park served as the only major public space along the river for years, but recently has been joined by additions on the same side of the river, such as South Waterfront Park, and by a complimentary feature on the east bank.

That complimentary feature is the Vera Katz Eastbank Esplanade. Completed in 2001, the Eastbank Esplanade forms a loop with Waterfront Park to full activate the waterfront through Old Town/Chinatown/Downtown and the South Waterfront on the west bank, and the Southeast neighborhoods on the east bank.

The Eastbank Esplanade really helps tie the waterfront together, and has also become another link in the city’s bicycle transportation network.

Naturally, it also has lovely views.

1,200 feet of the Eastbank Esplanade actually floats. It’s the longest floating walkway of its kind in the United States.

Designed to give the sensation of walking on water, the floating walkway also features a floating public boat dock.

Back on the west side of the river, we also took the MAX light rail to the Goose Hollow neighborhood adjacent to Downtown, and walked up the hill to Washington Park.

In contrast to the tightly designed urban squares like Jamison Square and Pioneer Courthouse Square, Washington Park serves a different purpose – it’s one of Portland’s huge preserved forest spaces. Once you’re inside Washington Park, it’s easy to forget you’re anywhere near a city.

Wandering through Washington Park, it’s a gorgeous collection of trees and hills with fountains and activity areas sprinkled throughout.

There’s really not much to add – it’s a gorgeous park, and a good example of the way a city needs multiple *kinds* of specifically-defined public spaces – beyond the simple calls for “open” or “green” space.

The entrance of Washington Park, high atop a hill (“hill” in the steeper Oregon sense, of course), also gives spectacular views out over the Goose Hollow neighborhood to Downtown Portland and Mount Hood.

Head far enough into Washington Park, and you’ll come across the International Rose Test Garden.

The International Rose Test Garden is, literally, a testing site for new hybrids of roses. Says the city’s Parks and Recreation Department:

In 1940 the International Rose Test Garden became an official testing site for the All-America Rose Selection (AARS), a Chicago-based non-profit association of rose growers dedicated to the introduction and promotion of exceptional roses. Since 1938 the AARS seal of approval has graced new rose varieties that have performed the best in the test gardens located throughout the country and representing all climate zones. Four plants of each entry are evaluated for two years on 14 different characteristics consumers desire in a garden plant including plant habit, vigor, disease resistance, color, flower production, form, foliage, and fragrance.

One could go on and on about Portland’s Parks – we haven’t even scratched the surface here – but the example is clear. It shows the sort of attractive and inviting place that is created when a city takes public space seriously.

Fort Worth is justifiably proud of several of its parks – the Botanic Gardens, Trinity Park, Tandy Hills Park, etc. What we’re missing are the sort of more intimate, expressly urban public spaces like Pioneer Courthouse Square, Jamison Square, etc. Too often in and around Downtown Fort Worth, what space we don’t use for development is instead given over to storing cars. Urban Fort Worth needs the kind of activated, attractive, and lively public spaces seen in cities like Portland if we are to truly create a livable and desirable urban city.

And now, here are some random photos from the various parks, plazas, and squares we saw in Portland.

The Lovejoy Columns in a plaza in the Pearl.

The fountain in Jamison Square.

Pedestrian street, Pearl District.

Sunset light at Tanner Springs Park.

Reading in Pioneer Courthouse Square.

Exploring the Classical Chinese Garden.

Detail of fence in Tanner Springs Park.

Strolling through Waterfront Park.

Fence in Tanner Springs Park.

Activity in Pioneer Courthouse Square.

Sunset in Tanner Springs Park.

May 22, 2009 5

Fort Worthology goes to Portland, Part Three: Ira Keller Fountain

By: Kevin Buchanan

It’s time for our next Portland post. Today, we’re going to shift gears just a bit, and take a trip away from the larger-scale posts to examine something very specific – the Ira Keller Fountain. We’ll have another post next week with more about Portland’s parks and plazas in general, along with more posts about the other topics we’ll be talking about.

The Ira Keller Fountain was one of the must-sees for us on this trip, because of its designer: Lawrence Halprin.

First, a bit of background. Lawrence Halprin is a landscape architect who designed several urban parks & plazas during the 1970s. Now, our disdain for most everything architecture from the ’70s is pretty well known to regular readers, but Halprin’s work is often an exception. Trouble is, it’s not so easy to see a lot of Halprin’s work, because it’s getting plowed down as it ages.

Here in Fort Worth, we are fortunate enough to have our own Halprin work – Heritage Park, on the north end of Downtown Fort Worth on the bluff looking out over the Trinity River. Heritage Park is one of our favorite, and we think most underrated, public spaces – and it’s also one of our most terribly maintained.

Heritage Park is an intimate collection of water features, plazas, and scenic overlooks designed by Halprin not long after Philip Johnson’s larger, more elaborate, and far more well-known Water Gardens opened at the south end of Downtown. Like most Fort Worth water-related parks, though, Heritage Park fell into severe disrepair and was unceremoniously closed a couple of years ago, with no word from the city. Even prior to the closing, it had been neglected and forgotten about.

To their credit, the city has recently opened up about the park and is working with Laurie Olin, a former associate of Halprin, on respectfully restoring and reactivating the park. This comes after a report by Carter + Burgess that recommended smothering Heritage Park with safety railings and other elements that would ruin Halprin’s vision and the park’s feel.

In preparation for the restoration of our own Halprin park, one of a dwindling number still intact in the United States, it can be helpful to look at other cities that have kept their Halprin designs. Few are as lovely as Portland’s Ira Keller Fountain.

Situated in the southeastern part of Downtown Portland, the Ira Keller Fountain was completed in 1970. It’s comprised of an elaborate water feature, running over and between blocks before culminating in a waterfall over concrete blocks and slabs. The waterfall feeds a pool, over which a series of concrete pads appears to “float” above the water, taking visitors close to the falls.

So much of ’70s architecture ages very, very badly, but Ira Keller seems to have aged quite gracefully. It’s a wonderfully inviting place, as the roar of the water seems to drown out your nervousness about playing on the various pads and steps. As architectural writer Walt Lockley writes:

Like the Apollo program, the Ira Keller fountain in downtown Portland Oregon is an accomplishment from the 70′s that we as a society could now barely manage. It’s a loud and playfully interactive physical expression of civic values that today seem too liberal and humane to be true, and, in that wonderful sneaky ability of environments to set our social expectations, it perpetuates those values. Protecting this fountain has a practical social benefit…

…As you advance towards the water in the collecting pools, you might wonder if you can trust you own sense of privilege, if you’re really allowed to do this. Trail your fingers in the fast flow up top, perch wet or dry atop the falls, wade barefoot into the bottom, or climb. You’re operating in that wonderful audio cocoon-bubble of privacy created by the loud rushing water, behind or maybe inside that wall of sound, so you feel alone and brave. Eventually you give yourself permission. Or you don’t. You decide how brave you want to get, or not. It’s a detail, but many have commented on that moment.

That’s right – incredibly, the Ira Keller Fountain has not been mangled by safety nannies and ADA regulations, even following its restoration. There are no safety railings at all. No walls around the edges. No barriers preventing you from interacting directly with the water and the architecture. Only a few standard signs, seen around all Portland water features, are present:

Please use caution while enjoying this fountain. Like all streams and waterfalls, slippery surfaces, rapidly moving water, pools of water and high drop-offs require careful attention.

That’s it. There’s nothing stopping you from dipping a toe in, running your hands along the falls, wading around the pads. It is the kind of public space we simply don’t do anymore. The restoration and ongoing use of Ira Keller Fountain is in direct opposition to the blandified, watered-down world of railings that Carter + Burgess recommended for Heritage Park, which is even less arguably dangerous than the Keller Fountain. Keller has kept its interactivity and its soul, and that little bit of mostly-imagined danger that, as Lockley says, lets you “decide how brave you want to get, or not.”

As Lockley further writes:

It’s that the verbal message of those signs is so effectively contradicted and drowned out by the bravery, openness, good sense and loud sexiness of the water, that’s the best part. There are no railings or fences. The place is untamed and attractively dangerous, like the natural world.

Of the Keller Fountain, civic planner Barbara Duncan writes (quoted on Lockley’s page):

Coming from another urban area (Oakland-Berkeley) a number of years ago my first reaction to Ira’s Fountain was slack-jawed disbelief. The thing most striking to me was its absence. Where were the signs saying ‘keep out,’ ‘danger’, ‘caution’, ‘no swimming’? There were no warnings or precautions visible. Did the lawyers know about this? How do they pay the liability? I was charmed, impressed and fell totally in love with the city of Portland at that point. Charmed that they cared enough to give over this energy and space to a non-revenue generator… To this day, many years since, I would name either the Salmon Street Springs or Ira’s Fountain as my favorite spots in the entire city. It is the joy factor of watching people interacting with the water. The kids especially are surprised that it is O.K. to go in. They look around as they approach the fountain, half-expecting someone to yell, ‘Stop, don’t touch that!’

Fort Worth is in a rare group of American cities that still have interesting works by Mr. Halprin. Not only should Heritage Park be preserved, but it should be preserved in a kind and respectful way to Halprin’s original intent. It should not be railinged and barricaded to death. Restore it, maintain it, don’t let the plants overgrow it again, make it the way it was supposed to be.

Portland’s preservation of Ira Keller Fountain is a great leading example. I’d be first in line to knock down most ’70s architecture, but something about much of Halprin’s work is different. He created fascinating spaces, and there is nothing else in Fort Worth even remotely similar to Heritage Park – not even the Water Gardens, which is the closest equivalent in town, is even vaguely like Heritage Park.

Keep Heritage Park in its intended configuration. We could wind up with a beloved, unique, and intimate public space in the heart of the Trinity River Vision, rather than a watered-down half-hearted effort covered in safety frosting.

The city’s new collaboration with Laurie Olin is encouraging – we may yet see Heritage Park reborn as it was supposed to be. For now, here are some more photos of Ira Keller Fountain, in Portland, Oregon – a place that “got it” with respect to their own Halprin projects.

Let’s hope Fort Worth “gets it,” too.

More in our Portland series to come, including:

Parks & Plazas
Architecture
Residential Development
Local Businesses
The retail scene in urban Portland
The brewpub culture
The vegan/vegetarian culture
Food Carts (seriously)

And more.

May 21, 2009 5

Fort Worthology goes to Portland, Part Two: Bicycling

By: Kevin Buchanan

In today’s Portland post, we’re going to talk about bicycling in the Rose City, including our meet-up with fellow urbanism blogger Elly Blue of BikePortland.org.

(Note: this post contains video from our friends at StreetFilms, a fellow member of the StreetsBlog Network that Fort Worthology is part of. Clarence and the gang at StreetFilms do an awesome job translating examples of urbanism, transit, and bike advocacy into cool videos, and we’re glad to have them featured here.)

Bicycling in Portland is a big deal. The city consistently appears at or near the top of bike-friendly cities in the United States, and the results are plain to see. More people ride bikes in Portland than in any other United States city – 3.5 percent of the population rides every day. While that’s still a ways off from the huge number of bike commuters in European cities, compare it with Fort Worth’s current 0.2 percent figure.

Bicycling is popular in Portland at least in part because it has been made easy, convenient, and safe (at the very least, compared to most other American cities). As opposed to the viewpoint prevalent in most of the U. S. (including Fort Worth until recently), which is typically “we’ll only put bike infrastructure in if there are enough people riding bikes,” Portland took the “build it and they will come” approach – creating effective, efficient bike infrastructure which helped encourage ever-larger numbers of bike traffic. Here in Fort Worth, we’re only just seeing this reversal now, with the “Bike Fort Worth” plan we wrote about recently.

This is just a small segment of the Portland bike transportation map. It’s massively larger and more intricate compared to the current Fort Worth bike system – though it pleases us that the Bike Fort Worth maps much more closely resemble this sort of network. The Portland bike network makes getting around the city by bike very easy, safe, and efficient.

Further, transit options feature bike support – all buses feature bike racks on front, the MAX light rail features hooks to hang bikes on in the trains, and the streetcar’s center, low-floor car allows space for bikes on the streetcar.

Here’s a closer view of the bike network in Downtown Portland.

Here, a closer view of the Pearl District/Chinatown/Old Town network.

A small segment of the North Portland network.

And here is a small segment of the Southeast Portland network.

The Portland bike route maps not only show easy paths from one location to another, but they also mark out higher-traffic streets, difficult connections, and difficult intersections to avoid.

Several of the routes are “bicycle boulevards” – featuring strong traffic calming measures to slow and discourage car traffic in favor of bikes and pedestrians. These feature traffic diverters letting cars out but not in, signs blocking entrance except by bikes, frequent speed humps, and small roundabouts with large trees and plantings in the middle of the intersection to slow traffic and discourage through driving.

I took this shot from a bike in one of the bike boulevards, as we went around the traffic-calming roundabout.

Several of the dedicated bike lanes in Portland feature these “bike boxes” to help give cyclists a safer start at traffic signals, as seen in this StreetFilm.

As a result, one can’t help but see tons of bikes everywhere they go in Portland. People ride them for fun, for commuting, for trips to the store, to visit friends – whatever. Particularly pleasing to us is the number of people riding bikes in normal clothing, rather than the spandex & lycra numbers most often seen in Fort Worth. Bicycle usage in Portland has climbed much farther up the summit of “normal,” and there it’s not seen as a strictly exercise/speed thing requiring tight-fitting clothes and helmets.

With so many people on bikes, there’s a real sense of “safety in numbers” as the amount of bikes on the road helps reinforce the correct behavior of car drivers in a mixed environment. While, of course, accidents do still occur, riding bikes in Portland feels far safer than the atmosphere in most of North Central Texas.

Portland also features huge amounts of bike parking, further encouraging the use of bikes as normal transportation. Naturally, there are plenty of standard bike racks – much, much more than you find around these parts.

Every block has multiple bike racks in front of stores, cafes, and other destinations.

Most of the bike racks take the form of the simple blue inverted-U rack, as seen above. They’re easily identifiable, extremely simple to use, and each will hold a couple of bikes.

Some areas feature more stylized racks. For example, in the north end of the Pearl District, bike racks take on the appearance of the nearby Fremont Bridge.

The racks installed by the legendary Powell’s Books feature the titles and authors of some bike-related books that can be found inside.

Rows of bike racks are often spotted filled with bikes, such as this scene in the “Vegan District,” home to Food Fight (an all-vegan grocery store), Herbivore Clothing, and Sweetpea Bakery.

Here, clusters of bikes park outside businesses in the North Mississippi district.

Another scene along North Mississippi.

Bike racks are only the start of bike parking infrastructure in Portland, though. Here, a covered bike rack setup, built on an extended sidewalk, is seen in the Hawthorne Boulevard district. This is known as a “bike oasis” and is something the city is starting to install more of around neighborhoods.

Huge amounts of bike parking are provided at major transit/commuter centers. Here, we see just a small portion of the rows upon rows of filled bike racks surrounding the OHSU South Waterfront office building & cafe, where bicyclists transfer to and from the Portland Streetcar and the Portland Aerial Tram discussed in yesterday’s post.

Another major bike parking initiative in Portland is the “bike corral.” This is where one or two on-street car parking spaces are removed and replaced with on-street parking for 25+ bicycles. The corrals are wildly popular with cyclists, and have been good for adjacent businesses, too – where once they had the capacity to have one or two vehicles parked, they now have the ability to have 25-65 vehicles in front of their business. In this shot, Elly Blue from BikePortland.org shows us a bike corral in the North Mississippi district. Elly gave us a great rundown on bike infrastructure projects in the city.

As an aside, we met Elly in the North Mississippi district, at a hole-in-the-wall Mexican diner & taqueria called Por Que No. Not knowing what to expect of Oregonian Mexican food, we were pleasantly surprised – the food was flavorful and vegetarian options abounded (as they do virtually everywhere in Portland – more on this in another post).

I really want to thank Elly from BikePortland for giving us her own personal resident’s perspective on the goings-on in her city, and for showing us the hospitality she did as we chowed down at Por Que No and then hung out at a nearby coffee shop. It’s always great to get the chance to interact with fellow urbanism/transit/bicycling bloggers, and Elly & the gang at BikePortland.org have got a great thing going. Thanks a bunch for everything, Elly – if you ever find yourself in Fort Worth, you have an open invitation to hang with the Fort Worthology crew, and we hope we can pay a visit to your city again.

Here is another heavily-used bike corral, this time in the Belmont district, on a drizzly day in front of It’s a Beautiful Pizza and a branch of local legends Stumptown Coffee. Fort Worthology’s own bikes, provided very graciously by the Ace Hotel in Downtown, are parked somewhere in the mass of bikes.

Speaking of the Ace, here’s another very popular bike corral, this time in front of their building in Downtown Portland.

Another bike corral in Belmont, next to some local establishments and across the street from one of Portland’s many urban grocery stores.

A rainy day hasn’t stopped the heavy use of this bike corral, also in the Belmont district.

A mom transports her kid in a popular Dutch cargo bike known as a Bakfiets past a bike corral in front of Fresh Pot in the North Mississippi district.

This Streetfilms video features both the Portland bike corrals and bike oases.

Portland’s river has not stopped them from connecting districts, either. While here, crossing the Trinity on the 7th Street or Lancaster bridges can be a hair-raising and frankly dangerous experience on a bike, the bridges in Portland feature much more effective infrastructure. Several bridges feature pedestrian & bike-only levels, such as on the Steel Bridge, while others feature wider pathways and signage for directing bikes & pedestrians. Here, on the Hawthorne bridge, cyclists and pedestrians have much more ample room to maneuver, and dedicated signage to help cross safely. Compare and contrast with the scene on 7th Street or Lancaster.

Here, a cyclist heading from Downtown to Southeast Portland (wearing fishnets, no less) waits for the Hawthorne bridge to lower again after allowing a sailboat to pass.

Bike & pedestrian routing signs headed out of Downtown on the Hawthorne bridge.

Cyclists and pedestrians crossing the Willamette River on the Hawthorne bridge.

Cyclists headed out of Downtown on the Hawthorne bridge.

Leaving the Hawothorne bridge and headed into the Hawthorne district proper, the wide sidepath transitions here into a conventional pedestrian sidewalk and a dedicated on-street bike lane.

Cyclists transitioning to on-street bike lanes off the Hawthorne bridge.

Dedicated bike lane as the Hawthorne bridge exits onto conventional streets.

Headed back into Downtown on Hawthorne, dedicated bike lanes lead to a transition to wide bike/pedestrian side path.

The bike lane & pedestrian path merge on the entrance to the Hawthorne bridge.

Approaching the bike & pedestrian-only lower level of the Steel Bridge from the Eastbank Esplanade.

The bike & pedestrian-only lower level of the Steel Bridge, a recent addition to the impressive 1912 structure.

One sight that is not to be missed in Portland is “bike rush hour,” as commuters head from Downtown to areas like Southeast and Northeast Portland. This Streetfilms video shows bike rush hour on the Hawthorne bridge.

Portland’s bike signage is also quite good. Far from Fort Worth’s current obscure bike route signs (a bicycle icon and a random number do not make clear, effective signage), Portland’s bike signage clearly marks bike infrastructure and gives useful information to cyclists. These signs, for example, appear all over the city. They give directions to destinations along bike routes and even give distance and average bike travel time to bike operators.

Improved bike signage similar to this is a part of the new Bike Fort Worth plan.

Where off-street bike paths meet on-street bike lanes & routes, Portland helps make the transition easy and safe for cyclists. In this StreetFilm, Rex Burkholder from PDOT explains a bike signal at one of the these intersections.

Portland also puts on bike & pedestrian events, such as the Portland Sunday Parkways. Here, six miles of streets are closed for a day to cars and used only by cyclists and pedestrians to create a giant neighborhood street festival.

Events such as these are another item mentioned in the Bike Fort Worth plan.

Here’s a few random bike scenes – this is in the Pearl District.

One of the many cyclists in the near Southeast Portland neighborhoods.

Always bikes around the countless neighborhood cafe/coffee shop hangouts that are sprinkled through every Portland neighborhood, such as the 3 Friends Coffee/Hungry Tiger Too building near the “Vegan District.”

Bikes out and about as evening approaches in the Pearl District.

A cyclist rounds a corner in the Pearl headed to the waterfront.

Parents on Bakfiets in the North Mississippi district.

Cyclists riding south through the Pearl near Jamison Square along the route of the Portland Streetcar.

The bike culture in Portland is truly impressive. Bikes are treated as serious transportation by the city, and as a result of their bike routes, lanes, parking facilities, and other support infrastructure, bicycling as transportation has exploded in Portland in recent years.

What’s encouraging is that while Fort Worth’s present bike plan leaves a lot to be desired, the new Bike Fort Worth plan goes in a very Portland direction, in keeping with the city’s goal of tripling bicycle usage by 2015. It’s a far more equitable attitude on bicycles than Fort Worth has shown in the past, and we can’t wait to see progress made on getting it implemented. Spearheaded by Fort Worth Transportation & Planning’s new senior planner Don Koski, Bike Fort Worth will be a radical upgrade to the city’s bike infrastructure and will give us at least a taste of the kind of bike friendliness that Portland exhibits.

More Portland posts to come, including:

Bicycling
Parks & Plazas
Architecture
Residential Development
Local Businesses
The retail scene in urban Portland
The brewpub culture
The vegan/vegetarian culture
The Ira Keller Fountain, a beautifully restored plaza space designed by Lawrence Halprin, in stark contrast to our own decaying Halprin space, Heritage Park
Food Carts (seriously)

And more.

May 20, 2009 22

Fort Worthology goes to Portland, Part One: Transit

By: Kevin Buchanan

And now, the beginning of a series of posts detailing our recent exploratory trip to Portland, Oregon – it’s Part One of “Fort Worthology goes to Portland.”

In today’s installment, we’ll be taking a look at Portland’s transit systems, including the much-talked-about Portland Streetcar.

We’ve been big supporters of the Fort Worth Streetcar proposal since Day One, and now having spent over a week living with the system that serves as a model for our own plan, we are pleased to be able to type the following sentence from first-hand experience:

The Portland Streetcar is awesome.

It doesn’t really quite hit until you’ve spent time around a modern streetcar just how much it has defined and shaped the built environment. The Portland Streetcar has helped enable the creation of some incredible, incredible places. It serves as a popular and reliable circulator and “pedestrian accelerator,” attracting a diverse range of riders crossing socioeconomic barriers. It ties Downtown Portland and its Portland State University district, the Pearl District, the Northwest/Nob Hill neighborhoods, Riverplace, and the South Waterfront/OHSU neighborhoods into one pretty cohesive urban space. It extends the practical walking distance across a good majority of the central city.

Developments and neighborhoods come to be defined at least in part by their streetcar proximity. Businesses feature it on their logos. Diners feature “streetcar specials” for riders getting off in front of their establishments. It becomes tightly knit into the very fabric of the neighborhoods it passes through in a way that no bus ever has or could. Streetcars are about mobility, yes, and development – but no less real is their incredible power in placemaking.

First, the basics. The Portland Streetcar currently runs on a circulator loop through urban Portland on the west side of the Willamette river. I say “currently” because an extension to the east side of the Willamette has just been approved which will radically increase the system’s reach, but construction has not yet started on that new segment.

At its northernmost, the streetcar runs from the Northwest district into the Pearl District, a former industrial expanse that is now one of the most impressive urban districts in the entire United States. Turning south in the Pearl, the streetcar then passes into Downtown Portland, and then into the heart of Portland State University. It passes from there through the Riverplace district into the new South Waterfront district, another impressive infill project on former industrial land.

Along the way, the streetcar allows easy transfers to TriMet buses, the MAX light rail system, and the Portland Aerial Tram.

Streetcar stops are simple affairs – a wide sidewalk, a slight raise in height to meet the streetcar’s floor, a shelter and a sign. They’re not that different from a bus stop – in fact, some streetcar stops are shared with bus lines.

The streetcars run roughly every 12-15 minutes at each stop (though as seen above, sometimes it’s more often), giving frequent service and helping to attract more riders. One of the most impressive bits about the stops are these, the real-time arrival information signs. Each streetcar has GPS and this information is piped to stops to show exactly when each streetcar will be arriving. From our experience, the times shown on the stop are bang-on accurate.

What’s also extremely cool is the real-time arrival map which allows riders to see exactly where each streetcar is on the network. Hovering your mouse over each streetcar allows you to see what its next stop is, and hovering over each stop shows the approximate time until the next streetcar arrives. It’s all a part of making transit more efficient and easy to use, which in turn increases ridership.

The Portland Streetcar uses these Skoda-Inekon cars made in Europe. They are comfortable, smooth, fast to accelerate, fully climate-controlled, and extremely quiet in operation. The only real noise during operation is a high, quiet whirring/whistle as their electric motors sing them along the tracks. In terms of ridership experience, they are nothing at all like either buses or even vintage streetcar systems like the Dallas McKinney Avenue line. They are the very definition of sleek, modern transportation.

Now, there’s even a group in Oregon building American-made streetcars for the system off the Skoda-Inekon design: United Streetcar

On-board, the streetcars are simple and easy to use. The front and rear cars have higher floors and many seats, along with rails and straps for standing. The middle segments have low floors for easy boarding, including physically challenged riders, with fewer seats and more standing room.

If you don’t already have a TriMet pass, passes can be purchased on-board the streetcar using these simple fare boxes.

Riding a modern streetcar is very comfortable and pleasant. There’s none of the lurching and bouncing of a bus – it really does glide quite smoothly over the rails.

The streetcar operates in mixed traffic with cars on most of its route. Despite some naysayers who blast the streetcar for “getting bogged down” in traffic, in practice this was not our experience. In riding the streetcar extensively during all hours of the day, we never experienced a delay of more than a few seconds – nearly always due to, say, somebody opening a door for too long on a parked car on the street side. A quick ring of the streetcar’s bell or blast of its horn cleared these up and we were quickly back on the way.

It’s certainly possible for traffic to impact a streetcar, just like a bus – but in practice, these instances seem pretty rare.

The streetcars integrate perfectly into the urban environment. Even though they’re longer than a bus, they still feel right at home in tight spaces. The overhead wires simply aren’t an issue, in terms of aesthetics – here, we’re seeing as many wires as you will ever seen on a streetscape, as the streetcar crosses the MAX light rail line here. The wires are negligible in their impact on the scenery.

Even in crowds, the streetcar operates well. Pedestrians feel comfortable walking around it, even in motion, as its tracks create predictable travel paths. In many places in Portland, the streetcar runs right past sidewalk cafes, and in fact in Portland State University it runs right through a pedestrian plaza in the center of campus. It passes no more than a few feet from a popular outdoor cafe on the college plaza, and never disturbs diners.

Here, a typical scene at a busy streetcar stop, showing the volume and range of riders and the simple stop setup.

Here, a streetcar headed into Downtown Portland passes by one headed to the South Waterfront. Seen on the sides of streetcars and at stops, a variety of advertising & sponsorship opportunities provide another example of business/streetcar integration. Sponsored stops are announced as such.

Much has been written about the development around the streetcar line, and “impressive” doesn’t begin to describe it. The Pearl District alone is a sea of extremely impressive development, both in adaptive re-use of historic buildings and in new construction. The streetcar has helped shape this development by encouraging an active streetscape, increased pedestrian activity, and by allowing developers to build far higher density and far less parking than would otherwise have been feasible. Without nearly as much parking to worry about paying for, developers can concentrate more on design, detailing, finishes, retail, and other aspects of their developments. Along the streetcar, you simply do not see the kind of massive parking garages common in infill here in Texas, such as those along West 7th Street. Here, the streetcar passes a former armory turned live stage theater.

Here, the streetcar passes a large residential building with ground-floor retail in the “Brewery Blocks” segment of the Pearl.

The streetcar in the Pearl. New infill can be seen rising in the background.

More Pearl District streetcar line infill.

More streetcar infill. The streetcar also stops at both of the Pearl’s major public spaces – here, we’re at Jamison Square (on the right).

Still more Pearl District streetcar infill. If you think the West 7th projects here in Fort Worth are impressive, the Pearl is on an entirely other level – and they’re lacking the huge parking structures that have accompanied the West 7th projects. The Pearl is block after block after block of extremely high-quality infill – far larger than the West 7th projects.

Here, more Pearl streetcar infill – including the famed “Streetcar Lofts” with accompanying neon sign.

Still more huge infill along the streetcar line, this time near Tanner Springs Park.

Everywhere you turn in the Pearl, you see block after block of attractive infill along the streetcar line, and bleeding into the blocks surrounding the line as well. Because Portland has very small 200′ by 200′ blocks, just like those in Downtown Fort Worth, walking a few blocks to catch the streetcar is seen as perfectly normal.

Still more streetcar infill in the Pearl, this time around Tanner Springs Park, the other major public space in the Pearl. We’ll be talking more specifically about Portland’s architecture and parks/plazas in later posts.

And still more streetcar infill around Tanner Springs Park.

Even more streetcar infill in the Pearl. The feel as one moves through the Pearl is of a more European than American city in some ways.

And – why not – some more streetcar infill in the Pearl.

And still more. This building was especially impressive – a very Streamline Moderne industrial feel, but built in 2000.

And more – this building was just about to open.

Some adaptive reuse of historic structures nearby.

And more.

And more – these are townhomes in an old building, right on the line.

More Pearl infill – and yes, that’s a Whole Foods.

Also right on the line, this incredibly impressive Safeway.

We could go on, but we’ll talk more about the Pearl’s architecture and Portland’s awesome urban grocery stores in other posts.

Another major infill development on the streetcar line is the South Waterfront, at the current southern terminus of the circulator loop. Here, formerly abandoned industrial land is being reclaimed as a dense neighborhood of residential, office, and retail space, and the streetcar links to OHSU via the Portland Aerial Tram.

More South Waterfront streetcar infill.

Still more of this epic infill project.

Still more transit operating in Portland are the MAX light rail lines. These are Portland’s equivalent of the Dallas DART light rail trains, in that they make stops in the city center but also run on dedicated right-of-way to outlying areas in more of a commuting fashion, like Beaverton, Gresham, and Portland International Airport. It’s a good example of rail transit covering the whole spectrum – MAX providing longer-distance trips and linking with the streetcar for the “last mile” connections.

TriMet passes work on MAX, buses, the streetcar, the WES commuter train (which we did not have a chance to see), and the Portland Aerial Tram, allowing seamless transfers between modes.

Here, MAX passes through the Old Town district of Downtown Portland.

And here, it passes through Downtown on its way to the Goose Hollow neighborhood.

Another transit system in Portland, and by far one of the most unique, is the Portland Aerial Tram, linking the Streetcar and South Waterfront with the OHSU campus on a hill high above the waterfront. The tram runs constantly through the day, ferrying workers and students up and down from the campus to a lower office building & cafe in the South Waterfront and an adjacent streetcar stop & major bike commuter parking area. The trip takes about three minutes each direction.

The aerial tram uses two of these futuristic silver pods running back and forth along cables between the South Waterfront and OHSU.

Here, we pass a South Waterfront-bound tram on our way to OHSU.

Looking up at the OHSU tram station from inside the pod.

The tram gives some truly spectacular views of the surrounding neighborhoods.

Entering OHSU station.

The tram takes on passengers at OHSU station.

Preparing to depart from OHSU to head back to South Waterfront.

The view from OHSU station – on a clearer day with a view of Mt. Hood, it would be even more spectacular.

South Waterfront from OHSU station.

The pod departs OHSU, while the other pod starts its climb back up the hill.

On-board the pod headed back to OHSU.

The view of Downtown from the pod.

Arriving back at South Waterfront station.

The pod heads back to OHSU.

The pod passes the system’s support tower.

Transit in Portland is extremely easy and efficient. It is not only possible to live car-free there, but downright pleasant to do so. When one combines the streetcar, MAX, the tram, and TriMet’s extensive bus network (many of which run every 12-15 minutes like the streetcar, in contrast to The T’s 30-minute to 1-hour scheduling so often seen here in Fort Worth) with a bicycle, one can get around very easily indeed.

We were particularly impressed with the Portland Streetcar, and it gives us even more enthusiasm to get our system built. The streetcar helped revitalize several areas of central Portland, and has become a tightly-knit part of life for residents as well as visitors. Often times the streetcars were standing-room-only, a testament to their ease of use and attractiveness to riders. The sheer amount and quality of infill seen along the line was very impressive.

This is our initial post in our series on Portland. In future posts, we’ll talk about:

Bicycling
Parks & Plazas
Architecture
Residential Development
Local Businesses
The retail scene in urban Portland
The brewpub culture
The vegan/vegetarian culture
The Ira Keller Fountain, a beautifully restored plaza space designed by Lawrence Halprin, in stark contrast to our own decaying Halprin space, Heritage Park
Food Carts (seriously)

And more. We will, of course, post about Fort Worth stuff at the same time, but looking at other cities which serve as models for our own development can be helpful in learning about techniques that can work here in Fort Worth as we urbanize. So, there’s more Portland to come.

Linklog

Browse the Fort Worthology Linklog - interesting and cool urbanism, transit, and bicycle links that aren't necessarily Fort Worth-centric.

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