Today was a pleasant day for a walk in the Elizabeth Street area. Elizabeth Street is mostly made up of houses, but these are clearly substantially if not completely used to house UK students. Houses are funky, unkempt, with the standard fare of student life: wicker chairs, houses flying the Jolly Roger. This area registers high on the stimuli meter, with the fragrances from the college kids and a little live music from the guy with a guitar on a porch.
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Day 133-Road…gone?
Today’s walk illustrates the trauma that is sometimes involved in repairing the fabric of the city. The mess of streets here, anchored by DeRoode way, have been removed. The homes here are gone, and when I visited, little remained except stray street signs for streets that are gone forever. The streets are being torn out for the final phase of the Newtown Pike Extension (labeled as the Oliver Lewis Way Extension on the map as of today). On the balance, this road work should benefit the city, not just in terms of traffic but also in terms of this area’s capacity as it will tie it much more firmly into the rest of the city. Still, it’s a little shocking to see the real-life effects of the city planning eraser.
Day 132
Today’s walk was in the neighborhood behind an office campus on Harrodsburg road. Its proximity to the campus was probably the most intriguing thing to me–these buildings, which house a couple of private colleges among other businesses, always intrigued me. The park area surrounding one of the buildings does appear to be mostly accessible from the neighborhood, though perhaps not entirely welcoming. That is, despite the decorative stone fence with a reasonable gap at the end of Poppy Lane, the park really feels like it belongs in a business park and not a neighborhood.
Day 131-Drama Free
This walk focused on stretches of Alumni and Chinoe that couldn’t be combined into loops and were done as out-and-back treks. There wasn’t a lot notable about either street; the walk itself was pleasant enough but nothing particularly surprising or intriguing presented itself on these busier streets (or the shorter portion that consisted of neighborhood streets).
Day 130-Some assembly required
Day 130 was a return to the Meadows neighborhood, near Bryan and New Circle Road, that I last visited last July, on Day 18. My impression of the area, having walked through on a cool, wet late fall day and a hot July day, is the same. This area shows some wear, but there are definite bright spots, freshly painted houses or yards that show evidence of life, toys or carefully curated landscaping. I really walked down two blocks, and the block length stood out. As I passed a long line of similar looking houses, I pondered the characteristics of a neighborhood. The neighborhoods in which I grew up consisted of a funky mix of houses, apartments, small stores, and community buildings like schools and churches. These things were all marbled together, so that there were, for example, two small grocery stores within a quarter mile. These neighborhoods had a sense of identity that was based around these local places and years later I could talk to someone about the supermarket with the pet name o a particular laundromat and they would know exactly what I was talking about. Technology–cars–have allowed us to broaden our range. We can work further away and this expands our opportunities. But neighborhood design that followed forced us to rely on cars for things that were typically provided in the neighborhood and has weakened that set of social bonds.