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Today’s route was an ill-advised route along Richmond Rd and Man O’War. This area is dominated by restaurants along Richmond and offices along Man O’ War and the side streets. Richmond is the most visually interesting but least walkable. The remaining streets are walkable but plain.
Today took me through a short stretch of high density residential next to some larger parcels including the Ashland Oil Company headquarters campus. It also featured one of the less exciting stretches of Man O’ War. There isn’t much to surprise here. I did spot one of the nicer phone company buildings I’ve ever seen. Instead of the usual windowless box, this building has a hip roof and faux windows to make it less foreboding.
The apartments and townhomes are 1980’s vintage and are nondescript. (Did you know there was an apartment complex along this stretch of Man O’ War? It surprised me!) Our aesthetics change, and apartments from this era have been impacted particularly negatively by this. But one complex does a nice job creating a “neighborhood” feel with relatively short setbacks and a consistent presentation toward the street (unlike some of the apartment buildings, which are loosely arranged in space.
Today was a split day, with a portion of my walk through a residential neighborhood just south of Man O’ War called Cove Lake and the rest along the commercial corridor along Richmond Road behind the neighborhood.
The contrast between residential and commercial is very clear along Lake Wales. This street appeals to me for a reason I can’t put my finger on. It feels as if maybe it is just less self-conscious than most streets. Lake Wales ends in a cul-de-sac, and it’s hard to tell from the map but it sits perhaps 12 feet over the adjacent car lot with a surprising view of brightly colored street lights at shoe level. Here, the sounds of insects is almost loud enough to drown out the sound of traffic passing through what is probably one of the city’s busiest intersections.
The commercial strip is, of course, image conscious. Besides, the car lot with the yellow and blue light posts, there are a number of fast-casual restaurants tending toward the trendy and up-and-coming, serving food out of buildings that weren’t here a year ago. This being the place to be, the biggest surprise may be that a lot that has yet to be built has signs of a previous building that must have been razed. Winding back on Eagle Creek, literally through a car dealership, puts you back in the older Cove Lake neighborhood.
The term “conspicuous consumption” is thrown around often enough to describe luxuries from extravagant phone accessories to large houses. The simple houses here belie a time when the aesthetic was quiet austerity. The tract houses built from the 1940’s through the 1960’s and into the 1970’s were generally simple. Houses along Eagle Creek are very different than the bright new restaurants with visually interesting facades.
What works: The commercial strip is adjacent to the neighborhood but feels buffered.
What doesn’t: The maps. Neither map provider I use correctly identified the intersection of Sand Creek and Richmond.
Today’s walk was dominated by the strip malls along Richmond Road at Man O’ War. Most of the time I find that walking slowly past a place allows a lot more detail to sink in than driving past quickly, but that was less true here. My biggest surprise was that the first of many painted horse statues that I will walk by during this project turned up in front of a Texas Roadhouse.
But today’s stroll did give me the opportunity to walk down nearby Rio Dosa and Locust Hill, past a retirement living complex and a pretty standard apartment complex.
I’ll probably say this about every single strip mall I walk past, but this again feels like an opportunity. Some of the people who work in the strip mall live in the nearby apartments. So do many of the people who shop at the grocery store. Yet this area is treacherous to travel by foot. Two things really stand out as contributors to this. One is the traffic flow. The service road concept works fine in small highway towns, but in areas with heavier traffic, drivers are forced to focus on too many things. A certain volume of traffic making left turns onto streets like Locust Hill is unavoidable, but there are design features that can make this a little less dangerous for pedestrians as well.
Second is the lack of pedestrian features in general. In this case (as in Hamburg) pedestrians are driven to walk through parking lots or narrow streets with landscaping. The message is that, if you don’t drive, we don’t want you. Sometimes this is not an obvious problem because of the type of businesses; indeed, this stretch has many car-oriented businesses. But this is short-sighted, as better pedestrian features might encourage someone to seek out a coffee shop while they wait for their car repairs.
What works: mix of apartments, including retirement complex, close to shopping
What doesn’t: true pedestrian connectivity could use some work
Today I returned to the parking lots of Hamburg, perhaps with a little more than the warranted expectation of finding something interesting, based on my experience on Day 4. Again, I spent a portion walking on streets where walking was outright discouraged (as on Pavilion and Vendor) or not likely to be particularly useful anytime soon (as on Man O’ War). Certain things feel like missed opportunities (a flat, grassy area between Man O’ War and a detention pond; the lack of any potential footpaths on the two smaller streets, which are traversed by workers if not shoppers.). It may be interesting to note that my earliest impressions of Lexington were based on this area, when I visited a nearby smaller town during a business trip in 2005. The aesthetic of this area is contemporary and has remained relevant. Despite the bland music piped through (why do places like this insist on speakers outside when the music they play is so offensively inoffensive?) I was given a few seconds of joy by the sounds of a would-be opera singer.
