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Day 96-Good bones but not a lot of meat

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This route took me back to Kenwick, this time walking lengthwise, parallel to Richmond Road, on Menifee and Monroe Avenues.  In terms of typology, there’s not a lot to add.  These houses are similar to those in the same areas of my previous walk down Sherman and Bassett on Day 76.  The houses on the north end of the area I passed through, on Owsley and Marne, tend to be older–1920’s era, then the late 1930’s and 1940’s houses on Sherman but are similar in other ways, rounding out the diversity in housing stock that I proposed made this neighborhood so economically diverse.

I like Kenwick.  It’s probably my favorite neighborhood so far.  Its relatively regular street network contributes to walkability and its diversity without a lot of obvious tension is unique.  Neighborhoods like Kenwick provide insights that planners and developers should take into account in planning future neighborhoods. But it has its problems which should also be addressed.  Block length is one.  The blocks heading northeast and southwest are long–close to a quarter mile.  The northwest/southeast blocks are very short, around 350 feet long.  The short blocks are dominated by the sides of houses that front the longer blocks which tends to make these blocks feel more desolate.  There also aren’t many destinations that are truly within walking distance.  National Avenue is close but still well over half a mile from the average home in the areas I passed by. The shops in the neighborhood are small and their location within the neighborhood rather than at the interface between neighborhoods probably limits their ability to serve as more than a convenience store. And even though there is a community center with a small park, it feels like there aren’t a lot of other public spaces. The net result is to delegate walking to recreational uses, even here.

View down Henry Clay Boulevard
View down Henry Clay Boulevard.
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Day 95-Sightlines

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I keep heading into the Joyland neighborhood with high expectations.  After all, this is a neighborhood that sits on the site of an old amusement park.  It should be fun.  This portion of the neighborhood feels much like similar neighborhoods from the 1950’s and 1960’s.  There were two things that stuck out to me today.  The first is that these streets feel wide, even by the standards of the era.  They aren’t really wider than streets in, say, Rookwood.  But with low houses, flat lawns and few trees in the tree lawn, it feels wide open.  I really want to draw up sectional views of different streets to show what a dramatic impact house height, setbacks and trees can have.  The second thing is that neighborhoods from this era feel stuck in time, more so than much older neighborhoods or slightly newer neighborhoods.  I’m not sure why this is–demographics may be a factor–though it seems to be fairly consistent.

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Day 94-Rounded Corners

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Day 94 brought me to two neighboring subdivisions, King Arthur, and Brigadoon, located along Wilson Downing between Nicholasville Road and Tates Creek Road.  The former consists of small, mid 1960’s era ranch houses while the latter is slightly older with generally larger houses.

Much as I like to use this project to highlight the little things I like, there are a whole host of things that I think could stand to be fixed.  Today’s walk offers a good opportunity to talk about a few of these. Of course, this era of development is consistently car-oriented but this area shows it particularly clearly.  Camelot Road, which seems to be serve primary to  shunt traffic from the neighborhood between Wilson Downing and Laredo, which then direct traffic out to arterial routes such as Nicholasville and Tates Creek.  Yet this road is given two lanes in each direction along with a median, at the intersection with Tates Creek.  It’s hard to judge this without seeing it at a peak period but it feels like overkill and makes for a very wide 70 foot crossing.  One measure of a street is corner radius, the radius of the curve between the edges (in many cases,  the curbs) of intersecting streets.  A larger radius means a more gentle curve.  Cars have to slow down less to navigate the turn, but the edges of the street become farther away at the corners resulting in longer crossings distances for pedestrians.  Here, the corner  radii are about 25 feet, far greater than they need to be in a residential area with 25 mph speed limits.  Since the large curb radii here allow cars to navigate turns at higher speeds while making pedestrians spend longer in the street, they make walking incrementally less safe.  Curb radii throughout Lexington tend to be on the large size.  The National Association of City Transportation Officials recommends that turning radii greater than 15 feet should “be the exception”.  But the 25 foot radii in King Arthur are smaller than the radii in some newer neighborhoods, a sign that streets are over-engineered.  In the case of Camelot, steep hills and curves decrease visibility, and crossing even this small street can get your adrenaline pumping.

A final observation of the quality of pedestrian experience is that the portion of Wilson Downing that is located behind the King Arthur neighborhood (and across from two schools) is neglected–spaces like it that aren’t fronted by any buildings often are.  The sidewalk was uneven, covered in mud in places and trash in most places including plenty of broken glass.  Particularly because of its proximity to the schools, I hope neighbors can find a way to improve this section of sidewalk!

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Day 93-Lollipops

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Today brought me to the Liberty Hills subdivision, just off Liberty Road and outside of New Circle Road.  This is a fairly typical 1990’s neighborhood.  Not a single street connected to any other street more than once, so I had to walk up and down each street.  The cul-de-sacs here are huge (I suppose they had to be built to handle a significant number of cars turning around) and resemble lollipops.

Side yard in the Liberty Hills subdivision.
Side yard in the Liberty Hills subdivision.

My gripes about street layout aside, this is a pleasant subdivision, with nice streetscapes and nice people.  There were a  few specific things that made it particularly nice.  As is often the case, the presence of trees in the tree lawn makes a big difference.  But there is a lot of texture in this neighborhood.  One nice example of this is the side yard and sidewalk pictured here. The side yard is set back further than the fence behind it.  Both the fence and the yard have texture too, in the form of a vine and landscaping respectively.  There are variations in both horizontal and vertical planes.  Beyond providing an example of how variations create a more interesting space, it also provides an example of how we can impact spaces after developers have left.

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Day 92-No Overnight Street Parking

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Today’s walk took me to the Saddle Club subdivision near Versailles Road and New Circle Road.  This seems like a newer version of the Lakeside neighborhood from Day 39, complete with a large loop.  Houses are clearly nice, with some architectural variety.

The overwhelming thing about this area was probably its proximity to the New Circle Road/Versailles interchange.  It was noisy, far noisier than yesterday’s walk in a residential neighborhood abutted by industrial uses and a rail line.  To top this off, New Circle Road is in the midst of a significant expansion project and the noise and asphalt odors were hard to avoid.

I got a kick out of signs in the Saddle Club area stating “No Overnight Street Parking.”  My experiences until relatively recently could not prepare me for this.  In some places, parking blocks from home is the price of having a car.  I’ve come to think of on-street parking as desirable and even chose my current neighborhood on the basis of the presence of on-street parked cars (though it turns in our case, it’s largely due to the presence of young drivers with their own cars–ah well).  It’s nice to remember that not only do some people have different priorities, in some cases they have completely different preferences as well.