A pleasant walk through the quiet Eastwood neighborhood along Liberty. The regular street trees add a sense of richness here that a lot of similar neighborhoods miss out on.
Tag Archives: Eastwood
Day 110-Liberty and Death
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Today brought me back to the Eastwood neighborhood. I don’t know that I really came up with a lot to add. I spent a fair amount of time navigating Liberty Road, which recently recorded a pedestrian fatality near here. If I could be mayor for a day and could add a sidewalk to any stretch of any road in Lexington, it would be this stretch of Liberty.
Day 84-Hibernation
Today was my first day back on the pavement in awhile as travel, viruses and weather have conspired against scheduled walks. I spent it in the Eastwood neighborhood, near Liberty road and next to the large Gatton property. This is a 1990’s era neighborhood and very similar to a lot of smaller developments near it and off of Liberty Road.
Two aspects of today’s walk were notable. First, though most of the snow that fell last week has melted off the sidewalks, there are still little snow walls or pillars made by shoveled snow from driveways and sidewalks. In some cases, the snow wall covered the sidewalks, revealing that some people may have shoveled their driveways but not their sidewalks. Ahem. The second aspect is that familiar phenomenon in which a spring-like day brings people out. Despite the sogginess of the melted snow on rain-saturated ground, people were in their yards or out walking. Good to see.
It’s perhaps worth a quick mention. The time off was not all for naught. I’ve made some tweaks to the map, with more perhaps to follow. I’m also much closer to providing dynamic maps for each post that should better highlight each day’s walk as well as allow more context.
Day 53-Parking Woes
Today I took a quick trip through the Eastwood neighborhood, near Liberty and Fortune Drive. This was a residential neighborhood, and most of the houses were townhouses, with some small houses as I moved further from Fortune. These seem to be relatively young, mostly early 2000’s homes.
With this area being dominated by multifamily homes and thus fairly dense, one thing that stood out was parking. Parking appeared to be a big problem here. No Parking signs were all over the place, in front of mailboxes, in front of trash cans, in front of private spaces. And cars were everywhere, too, even in the middle of the day. What do these people do when then want to invite company over? The interesting thing is that there really didn’t appear to be a lack of spaces, with units having garages in most cases, and often a second dedicated space. There were additional visitor spaces too. So how many car spaces does a family living in a townhouse need?
I was reminded of something I saw recently about a residential parking garage in Portland that is well under capacity. And while there are a lot of differences between downtown Portland and Lexington outside of New Circle Road, clearly there are conditions where people survive, get to work, get groceries, all presumably contentedly and with something less than 2 cars per family. To an extent, we understand what those conditions are and they usually involve “density” and “transit” which are four-letter words in many places. So part of the question for a city like Lexington may be whether it is desirable to create those conditions, and part of the question may be, if so, could they be created in a specific location such as this one.
Day 22
Today, I looked at one of the smaller neighborhoods located along Liberty Road, in this case with it’s entrance at Gerardi Road. This appears to be an amalgamation of houses built by several different builders (some of my favorites were located along Kingsbury and were very forward-facing, with nice porches).
There were really two especially noticeable things to me here. First, people within the neighborhood are willing to adopt creative solutions from their neighbors. I saw two houses with garages converted into Florida rooms. The idea of garage-as-living-space is not new–I’ve found it’s very common. But these rooms took things a step further with the degree of furnishing and the addition of a sun screen curtain. 
Residents here also have found a solution to unsightly manhole covers (another common sight in Lexington), by decorating them with large potted plants. But something else is evident here: this neighborhood has a serious concrete problem. For a neighborhood built in the late 90’s, the sidewalks and driveways are in generally terrible shape, though it varies quite a bit from house to house. I’m guessing, but I think the culprit may be salt for melting ice (and which I’ve also seen used on snow in lieu of shoveling). But perhaps the concrete is to blame as well, as even some concrete slabs appear to be deteriorating.
The good: unique solutions, and a willingness to imitate neighbors.
The bad: concrete.