Today was a return to the “Dixie” section of Eastland. This area is pretty typical of its neighborhood cohorts. It’s well kept but shows its age. It seems to have a little more economic diversity than the average Lexington neighborhood but (as I’m finding) it’s sometimes difficult to perceive some of these subtleties through a surface-level view of the neighborhood.
The mail pouch work shed is worth a moment. It seems odd, at first, but I suppose its consistent with our image of suburbia as keeping us close to both our agrarian past and our urban present.
Today took me to another neighborhood with lots of 1960’s vintage ranch houses. Like several neighborhoods of similar age, it was quiet, both in the sense that it appears stable (there were few, if any, houses for sale in the portion I walked through) and in that it was literally quiet.
I tried something different today. I’ve been hoping to work trails into the discussion because trails contribute to the walking experience as much as most of the streets I’m walking along. The difficulty may be in working them into the project, as there isn’t a reliable, unified source for trails. Lexington-Fayette County maintains and provides data on bike trails, for example, but the data set doesn’t include the park trails I walked on today.
Still, walking through the park gave me an opportunity to think about parks and how they work. Large parks can be nodes of activity, an interface between communities that invites conflict and serendipity. Smaller parks that serve limited, more homogenous areas, don’t have that same allure of spectacle even though they may similar facilities.
Dixie park has the standard park equipment plus a small disc golf course.
Dixie Park is on the small side but could benefit from big park allure because of its location within the neighborhood and the fact that unlike many of Lexington’s smaller parks, it’s accessible from it’s neighborhood’s feeder route. It also has a unique amenity in it’s small disc golf course.
What works: Park located centrally within the Eastland area with connections to several streets.
What doesn’t: School pickup rush hour along the northwest portion of Eastland!
Sometimes, interesting things pop up in unexpected places. This walk started out about as expected,with a tour of underutilized shopping areas and overgrown parking lots. It was tempting at this point to look at these empty parcels, thing about the inexorable increase in density and imagine some nice apartments. But the parcels are awkward, surrounded by the back end of the Eastland shopping center, New Circle Road and the light industry nearby. Obviously, cities need industry, and industry is often functional and little else, though sometimes the functional can be elegant and thus beautiful in a different sense.
Diaz Alley
Diaz Alley meets this criteria, I think. It is just that—an alley, for the light industrial buildings on Commercial Dr and Industry Rd.
Good: thriving light industry
Bad: underutilized areas by New Circle Road will probably remain that way for some time
