Today’s walk was in Kenwick, not far from yesterday’s route in the Fairway neighborhood. Heavy rain dampened the leaves and made for a very different walk despite the still-pleasant weather. Handmade signs asking drivers to slow down are common in front of houses here. There are no tree lawns and yards generally feel a little less grand. Mentelle Park offers some common space, the only such space on this route.
Tag Archives: Richmond
Day 108-All business
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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.
Day 76-The Third Block
My last walk in 2014 passed through the Kenwick neighborhood , northeast of Richmond Road. This was an exciting walk for me for a couple of reasons. It’s my first good opportunity to test out a method of covering streets in which I will walk along a set of parallel streets on one day and then cover the intersecting streets at later date. (There aren’t a lot of areas that have a good string of parallel streets.) On a personal level, this was neat because it took me past a house that looked at and that was at one time high on our list of potential homes.
When we were looking at houses, I remember being told multiple times that this was a neighborhood in transition. Look for a house in the first couple of blocks, closer to Richmond road. That third block, we were told, was a little rougher. The character definitely changes as you progress northeast from Richmond toward Robertson and the RJ Corman tracks behind the neighborhood. The contrast between the first block of Bassett and the third block of Sherman is especially clear. The houses on the southwest end of each street typically date from the 1920’s or early 30’s. The houses on the northeast are smaller, and generally seem to have been built in the late 1930’s. Especially on Sherman, there seems to be a lot of infill, with many houses clearly newer than the 1930’s or 40’s. There is a lot going on–not only new construction but also remodeling. It may be a neighborhood in transition, but it doesn’t have the degree of tension that I found nearby on Day 17. I think diversity may have been built in with the variance in housing stock and, since it’s always been there, it’s less of a concern. It’s perhaps more a lucky accident of timing than anything else, as the Depression certainly had an impact on how these blocks developed.
Day 32
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