Where the Sidewalk Starts
Dubai barely has them; in New York they’re bustling with people and halal food stands. Research the history of the sidewalk—that liminal gap between street and building that serves as a gathering place for some and a bike path for others. Where did they first emerge—and when were the first modern sidewalks built? How different are they from place to place?
The term "sidewalk" is preferred in most of the United States and Canada. The term "pavement" is more common in the United Kingdom. Australia, New Zealand, and many other Commonwealth countries use the term "footpath". Sidewalks have operated for at least 4,000 years. The Greek city of Corinth had sidewalks by the 4th-century BC, and the Romans built sidewalks – they called them sēmitae.
The first modern sidewalk was in London. Following the Great Fire of London in 1666, urban centers began prioritizing pedestrian safety, leading to efforts to separate foot traffic from carriages. In the 18th century, London authorized the creation of footways using stone to elevate pedestrian traffic above, using 1766 legislation to create, improve, and regulate these walkways.
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In San Francisco, wooden sidewalks were common until a 1900 bubonic plague outbreak led to their replacement with concrete to eliminate rat habitats. In the 1890s to 1930s, the proliferation of concrete saw thousands of miles of sidewalks laid in US cities, regulating, controlling, and elevating pedestrians safely away from street traffic. In different places, sidewalk construction utilized different materials, from brick, wood, and flagstone. In many places now, have plain cement pavement. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 revolutionized modern sidewalk design by mandating features like curb ramps and tactile paving for visually impaired pedestrians.
In the once-futuristic world of the Jetsons, the sidewalks don’t just sit there: they whisk people along to their destinations. Something like this still happens at many airports and even some amusement parks. Learn more about historical efforts to popularize moving sidewalks. Discuss with your team: why didn’t they catch on more widely? Where would you install them today, if you could?
The public’s fascination with the concept of “movable pavement” extends back more than 130 years. Today, moving sidewalks are largely relegated to airports and amusement parks, but there were big plans for the technology in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1871 inventor Alfred Speer patented a system of moving sidewalks that he thought would revolutionize pedestrian travel in New York City. Sometimes called the “movable pavement,” his system would transport pedestrians along a series of three belts running parallel to each other, each successively faster than the next.
An 1890 issue of Scientific American explained Speer’s system:
These belts were to be made up of a series of small platform railway cars strung together. The first line of belts was to run at a slow velocity, say 3 miles per hour, and upon this slow belt of moving pavement, passengers were expected to step without difficulty. The next adjoining belt was intended to have a velocity of 6 miles per hour, but its speed, in reference to the first belt, would be only 3 miles per hour. Each separate line of belt was thus to have a different speed from the adjacent one; and thus the passenger might, by stepping from one platform to another, increase or diminish his rate of transit at will. Seats were to be placed at convenient points on the traveling platforms.
The first electric moving sidewalk was built for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The moving sidewalk featured benches for passengers and cost a nickel, but was undependable and prone to breaking down. As the Western Electrician noted in the lead up to the Exposition, there was a contract for 4,500 feet of movable sidewalk designed primarily to carry those passengers arriving by steamboats. When it was operating, people could get off the boats and travel on the moving sidewalk 2,500 feet down the pier, delivered to the shore and the Exposition entrance.
The 1900 Paris Exposition had its own moving walkway, which was quite impressive. Thomas Edison sent one of his producers, James Henry White, to the Exposition and Mr. White shot at least 16 movies while at the Exposition. He had brought along a new panning-head tripod that gave his films a newfound sense of freedom and flow.
Likely inspired by the 1900 Paris Expo, this moving sidewalk of the year 2000 was one in a series of future-themed cards released in 1900 by the German chocolate company Hildebrands.
The moving sidewalk again came into vogue in the 1920s when the city of the future was imagined as something sleek and automated. The February 8, 1925 issue of the Texas newspaper, the San Antonio Light, featured predictions about the year 1975 from the great prognosticator Hugo Gernsback. The article included a prediction for the moving sidewalk of fifty years hence:
The 1930s and 40s largely saw the world much more pre-occupied with the Great Depression and World War II respectively, but postwar American companies really pushed the idea of moving sidewalks into high gear. Goodyear was at the front of that effort and in the early 1950s drew up different plans for the use of moving sidewalks in stadium parking lots and a radically re-imagined New York subway system. The May, 1951 issue of Popular Science explained to readers that the moving sidewalk was like an “escalator running flat.”
Today, Goodyear makes the moving sidewalks you can find at the Disney theme parks. Goodyear’s moving sidewalks were also featured in the June 7, 1959 edition of Arthur Radebaugh‘s Sunday comic Closer Than We Think. The comic explains that the moving sidewalk — which Goodyear imagined would be used to transport sports fans from a stadium to the parking lot — was indeed built at the Houston Coliseum.
Our fascination with movable sidewalks have not ended and one of the coolest one is at the Chicago O'Hare airport, where art meets motion.
Many sidewalks have cars parked alongside them. There are at least a billion parking spots in the United States alone—three times as many as there are people. With your team, investigate the history of parking, then discuss with your team: should people have a right to free parking at their homes and places of work?
Author Henry Grabar says parking codes, parking lots and garages have shaped the landscape of cities and suburbs, and limited the creation of affordable housing. He covers the story of how we destroyed our cities in search of more and more available parking and the people who helped make it so - the mall builders, mobsters, police and the politicians, the garage magnates and community groups.
Each city has its own parking customs or traditions. For example when it snows and there is street parking, there will be claims made on the street, such as placing objects, chairs and you can't move it, even if that is not a legal claim. The author also shares his frustration for not being able to find a parking space " the premonition that I will have trouble parking discourages me from driving."
According to Grabar: "I learned when I was working on this book was that at the dawn of the auto age, as parking garages become a fixture of American downtowns, there are some city planners and architects who think that parking garages will assume the grandeur of Europe's great - or America's great - train stations." That never happened and now parking garages are trying "to maximize the amount of cars they can park per square foot, and they're not really that interested in creating a pleasant user experience."
Meter rates are actually, for the most part, pretty low in most cities, which is to say they are below the market clearing price that would create empty spaces on every block. Most cities make more money from illegal parking fines than they do from meters and garage taxes put together. So, for example, New York City in 2015 made $565 million in parking fines. It's the biggest category of fines that the city issues. But they made just $200 million from parking meters. He explains that cities almost purposely not correct parking issues in cities, so that they can capitalize on illegal parking fines. For example, the New York City Department of Finance has with some of the biggest illegal parking violators. So those are companies like FedEx, UPS, grocery delivery companies like FreshDirect. Now, they account for about a half a million parking summonses in New York City every year. And that's just the times they get caught.
So it is possible to meet all three demands for parking? convenient, available and free. Well, parking in a dense city is expensive because it take a lot of space. And building parking lots are expensive. He cites how recent projects where it's in the six figures - $100,000 for every stall of parking. Having parking incentivizes people to drive, leads to more traffic and also higher cost of houses. They realized that required parking is a major impediment to achieving housing affordability.
Back in the 1950s and '60s in this country, there were laws that require that every type of building have a certain number of parking spaces. These laws changed the way that cities are designed. It's not possible to have a long street with many shops, because it doesn't take into account the parking requirement. For example, to supply the book mandated amount of parking for the Empire State Building today, you would have a surface parking lot stretching over 12 Manhattan blocks. Cities are finally rethinking and abolishing these parking lot requirement rules.
Lastly, parking lots, since it was a cash business, became a huge trap for money laundering and mob activities. One famous scandal was in Philadelphia airport where people parked and paid but the parking management pocketed the money.
Last interesting trivia: Carl C. Magee, a newspaper editor and traffic commissioner, invented the world's first working parking meter, Park-O-Meter No. 1, which was installed in Oklahoma City on July 16, 1935. Facing severe traffic congestion in downtown areas, Magee developed the device to encourage a quicker turnover of parking spaces. The first meter was placed at First Street and Robinson Avenue in Oklahoma City, charging five cents per hour.
People usually park their cars and then dash on to their destination as quickly as they can; they may not give the parking lot itself a second glance. Liminal spaces are easy to overlook on your way to somewhere else. But some parking lots are self-conscious architectural masterpieces. Read about the Temple Street Parking Garage in New Haven—and then look into these other lots below. Should more parking lots be built with this much architectural flourish, or should they be as invisible as possible?
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Author: Paul Rudolph
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Location: United States (New Haven, CT)
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Year: 1959
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Elements: Stair / Ramp, Structure
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Status: Built
“When the New Haven parking garage was being constructed, the remainder of the buildings in the adjacent blocks was not determined. They should have been designed to dominate the parking garage…The parking garage is a peculiar twentieth-century phenomenon. The one in New Haven comes from the design of throughways. Most parking garages are merely skeletal structures which didn’t get any walls. They are just office building structures with the glass left out. I wanted to make a building which said it dealt with cars and movement. I wanted there to be no doubt that this is a parking garage.”
The six-story Temple Street parking garage is fully made by reinforced concrete using organic forms to connect the different elements. The shapes are made with wood form-work creating a very powerful texture in the whole interior. The rails are also made in concrete (what it creates a powerful form from the exterior) and they are later connected to the parking slabs.
Lego Parking House | Billund, Denmark
The LEGO Parking House in Billund, Denmark, is a five-story parking facility recognized globally for its playful architecture that mimics iconic LEGO City road plates. It serves both the staff of the LEGO Campus and visitors to nearby attractions like LEGOLAND®. Danish architecture studio CEBRA has designed the facades of a car park for Lego in Billund, Denmark, which features a road layout based on the toy company's City road plates. The design used across the facades is directly based on Lego's City road plates,
which were originally created in 1977 and are still being sold by the company. The perforations in the façade panels are based on the standard LEGO brick ratios. These holes are a 1:1 match with physical bricks, allowing visitors to actually attach real LEGO pieces to the building's walls.
"We had a really good and open design process with the client, and we suggested nearly 40 different ideas to discuss," explained CEBRA founding partner Mikkel Frost. "All the ideas revolved around the LEGO bricks or products. The scope was to somehow reflect the company, their identity and their amazing inventions."
Parc des Celestins | Lyon, France
The Parking des Célestins (officially Parking LPA - Célestins) in Lyon, France, is a world-renowned subterranean parking facility located beneath the Place des Célestins. It is famous for its award-winning architectural design and a unique art installation that can be viewed from the square above. Designed by architects Michel Targe and Jean-Michel Wilmotte, the car park is a seven-story cylindrical structure that spirals around a central drum. In 1996, it won the award from the European Parking Association for Europe's most remarkable car park renovation project.
You can view Buren's rotating mirror from the surface through a large periscope located in the square, in front of the Théâtre des Célestins. Usually underground parking is so boring, dark, and scary, but this design changes the mood completely. The design is so cool that it looks like it is a scene out of a sci-fi movie and I think parking here would be an exciting experience.
Michigan Theater | Detroit, Michigan
It was built upon the birthplace of the Ford automobile, so perhaps it’s fitting that Detroit’s Michigan Theater is now a parking lot – except that such a use seems to be such a terrible waste for such a stunning historic structure. Built in 1926 alongside the connected 13-story Michigan Building office tower, the 4,000-seat Michigan Theater has been left to decay, another casualty in
Detroit’s long decline since its heyday as a car-manufacturing mecca. Designed by Rapp & Rapp in the French Renaissance style, the 4,000-seat theater featured 10-foot crystal chandeliers and a 2,500-pipe Wurlitzer organ.
“It is not merely a theatre for Detroit,” John H. Kunsky, the theater’s owner, told The Detroiter in August 1926. “It is a theatre for the whole world. It is designed to be the great showplace of the middle west.” It was described in the press as “a jewel”, and “the world’s finest”. The auditorium featured 10-foot crystal chandeliers that hung eight floors above the seats, and the mezzanine was open to black-tie guests only. But by the mid-1960s, the Michigan Theater was among dozens in the city to close due to dwindling profits, and though it was saved from the wrecking ball in 1967, its glory days were over.
Ironically, one of the factors that forced the closure of the opulent theater was a lack of parking. The theater faced stiff competition from modern nearby theaters that offered plenty of parking space. After a brief interlude as a music venue, during which it drew some of the industry’s biggest names, the Michigan Theater was gutted. While the shell of the building remained intact, it was filled with a three-level, 160-space parking deck. The space is a popular filming location, most notably featured in the rap battle scenes of Eminem's 8 Mile.
Garagenatelier Car Park | Herdern, Switzerland
If, by any chances James Bond would like to park his car in Herdern, Switzerland, he would most certainly do it classy at ‘Garagenatelier’ by Peter Kunz Architects. The volume preserves space for eight cars. The cubes, embedded in the terrain serve as directed lighting for the parking area in the back. The cube at the end has a sliding door and acts as the entrance. The beton cubes remind of a ‘Minimal Art’ installation, promoting the unique expression as well as the juxtaposition of nature and the geometric structures made of concrete.
9th Avenue Parkade | Calgary, Canada
In Calgary, Alberta, however, two architecture firms have come up with a pretty snazzy solution in the form of a convertible parking lot. Today, the 9th Avenue Parkade can fit 510 cars, but tomorrow—or more likely in 20 to 30 years—the building can easily be reimagined as a 600-person office or a 50-unit residential building. The key to such an adaptive building lies in its hollow, pill-shape footprint. Most multistory parking lots have you drive up in a spiral ramp until you find a spot (which, by virtue of Murphy’s law, is always at the top!). Except, those
ramps can be as steep as 5 degrees, which isn’t exactly ideal when those are the floors of your living room. As 5468796’s founding partner Sasa Radulovic points out, such ramps are also “very expensive to build, require a lot of concrete to do what they need to do, and they’re completely unconvertible.”
So instead, the architects designed a long, oval building that spans about 500 feet from one end to the other. You still have to drive up to get from one floor to another, but the span is much longer, flattening the gradient down to about 1% to 2%. Whether or not the building will ever be converted into something other than a parking lot remains unclear, but if and when that happens, Radulovic says it could take about a year to convert the entire building, or it could happen gradually: levels six and seven, for example, could be turned into housing whenever, and cars could still access floors three to five through the removable ramp. But even if the parking lot never ends up giving up its core tenant, namely the car, the 9th Avenue Parkade provides an intriguing model for hybrid architecture that looks to the future—and looks cool in the present, too.
Many suburban homes don’t hide their parking lots at all—their garages are front-and-center. Consider these so-called “snout houses”, then discuss with your team: have you seen any in your community, and would it be better if their garages were more hidden?
These houses, where the most prominent element you see from the street is the garage, are often called snout houses because the garage pokes out like a big snout. From a design standpoint, they strike me as incredibly weird — like a house for a car with a couple rooms for the car's caretakers in the back. This layout is popular on narrow lots because it allows for a large attached garage while keeping enough depth for a backyard.
Critics argue it creates a "desolate" streetscape that looks more like a row of storage units than a neighborhood. Due to these criticisms, several cities have passed laws to limit or "outlaw" the snout house style. In 1999, Portland, Oregon became one of the first to enact strict "anti-snout" regulations, requiring front doors to be closer to the street than garages.
Modern architect Frank Lloyd Wright would certainly have hidden them: he imagined cars living inside of houses. For him, there was no need for wasted liminal space between homes and streets. Explore the design and history of his famous Robie House, then discuss with your team: does it truly “blur the boundaries between interior space and the world of nature”? How different would your school look if it had followed the same principles?
In the early 20th century, the citizens of Oak Park, Illinois were terrorized by “The Yellow Devil,” a 45 horsepower Stoddard-Dayton sports car painted yellow with brown seats and brass trim. Behind the wheel was famed American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, clad in a linen duster and driving goggles, speeding around Oak Park at speeds up to 60 mph.
Wright was one of the 20th century’s biggest automotive obsessives, owning more than 80 vehicles in his lifetime. The Yellow Devil was just the first of many cars to enter Wright’s collection, alongside manufacturers like Bentley, Mercedes, Jaguar and Cadillac. Wright was enthralled with both speed and — more importantly — the design of the automobile.
Around the same time Wright was terrorizing Oak Park in his Stoddard-Dayton, he was working on one of his most important early works: the Robie House. Engineer Fredrick C. Robie, assistant manager at the Excelsior Supply Company, a bicycle company delving into the growing world of automobile manufacturing, contacted Wright to work on his home. The two immediately clicked on a personal level, no doubt a result of their shared interest in automobiles. Robie said of Wright, “When I talked in mechanical terms, he talked and thought in architectural terms. I thought, ‘he was in my world.’”
Due to Robie’s automotive enthusiasm, Wright incorporated a three-car garage into the design of the house itself, comprising a majority of the ground floor. The garage itself featured an area for washing cars as well as a pit for working on engines. In the mid-’30s, when the proliferation of the automobile meant that more Americans could own their own car, Wright incorporated car culture. The result was what Wright dubbed the “carport,” a minimalist automotive shelter that would become more utilized not just in Wright’s designs, but in other home designs later in the 20th century.
As Wright’s designs evolved, so did his use of the carport. On one of his most famous works, Fallingwater, there is a four-car carport adjacent to the guest house. In Wright’s public and commercial works — those both realized and proposed — another automotive structure was incredibly predominant: the spiral ramp. One of his earliest and most prominent integrations of this design element was in the proposed plans for the Gordon Strong Automobile Collective on Sugarloaf Mountain in Maryland, designed in 1924. Proposed by Chicago businessman Gordon Strong, it was to be a scenic destination for motorists that would provide visitors with attractions like planetariums and dance halls, in addition to views of the surrounding areas. Wright’s solution: designing the building with an outer spiral as the main structure. This would allow motorists to ascend and descend the building without leaving their car. But that plan was rejected by Strong. Wright persisted in his favor of the spiral design and the most important implementation of the spiral ramp saw fruition in Wright’s final design: the Guggenheim Museum. From the outside, the Guggenheim looks almost like an inverted form of the Gordon Strong Automotive Objective.
Completed in 1910, the house Wright designed for Frederick C. Robie is the consummate expression of his Prairie style. The house is conceived as an integral whole—site and structure, interior and exterior, furniture, ornament and architecture, each element is connected. Unrelentingly horizontal in its elevation and a dynamic configuration of sliding planes in its plan, the Robie House is the most innovative and forward thinking of all Wright’s Prairie houses.
The expansive living space at the heart of the home is one of the great masterpieces of twentieth century architecture and interior design. The light-filled open plan is breathtaking in its simplicity—a single room, comprising a living and dining space, divided only by a central chimney. Doors and windows of leaded glass line the room, flooding the interior with light. Iridescent, colored, and clear glass composed in patterns of flattened diamond shapes and diagonal geometries evoke floral forms, while subtly echoing the plan and form of the building. In his design of the Robie House, Wright achieves a dynamic balance between transparency and enclosure, blurring the boundaries between interior space and the world of nature beyond.
Observe how Los Angeles has transformed one set of downtown parking lots into a new community gathering place, then discuss with your team: are there places in your own city that should be converted in a similar way?
The design of Grand Park has no smaller aim than to express the multicultural diversity of Los Angeles through landscape design and architecture. The park transformed a 12-acre space filled with parking lots into “The Park for Everyone,” a community gathering place that has redefined Downtown Los Angeles. Grand Park creates an important link between important Los Angeles civic buildings and cultural icons — from City Hall to Grand Avenue, connecting the Park with The Music Center, Disney Concert Hall, and the Broad Museum.
The program features a restored historic fountain and new interactive water feature, new lawns and gardens, a dog run, a playground, and a pedestrian loop. Custom site furniture was designed in a bright magenta that has come to be known as “park pink,” playing a large role in defining the park’s identity. The furniture creates a community Southern California-backyard feeling with the inclusion of freestanding benches, café tables, and chairs.
The park’s layout takes inspiration from Goode’s homolosine projection, an innovative mapping process for depicting the three-dimensional world in two dimensions with minimal distortion. To represent the many cultures that have settled in Los Angeles, Grand Park features species from each of the world’s six floristic kingdoms – Cape, Boreal, Neotropical, Paleotropical, Australian, and Antarctic. The unique conditions in each of these regions favors different flora, but they all flourish in L.A.’s climate of easy adaptation.
Urban design continues to change and parking lots may be a signature of the development and inefficiencies of the 1900s. How cities will evolve them, transform them into new useful features, destroy them and introduce new ways to commute? The answers will lie in how we answer to climate change, diversity and social welfare to find the most comfortable distance between all of us.