Designed for Community

(Source: Strong Towns/Daniel Herriges.)

When I was a kid, every Fourth of July, my parents would take us to the parade in the St. Anthony Park neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota. It was not the neighborhood I grew up in, but it wasn’t far, and it always hosted far and away the best Independence Day festivities in the city. This year, I got to take my own kids for the first time.

The parade is a delightful slice of Americana, ridiculous in all the best ways. There’s an old-school oompah band. A lawn chair brigade. A Boy Scout troop. People on stilts throwing candy to spectators. People in giant fuzzy animal costumes throwing candy to spectators. So much candy. The obligatory succession of local politicians, including, most years, the mayor. The residents of the local nursing home in wheelchairs pushed by staff and family members. At the end of the whole thing, hundreds of children on bikes and tricycles decked out with streamers are invited to bring up the rear, followed by a generalized procession of more or less the whole neighborhood, who pour down a small hill into a city park for an afternoon of cookouts, raffle drawings, food and ice cream trucks, games, and live music.

The whole event exists out of time. I was struck this year by how remarkably unchanged any of it is from my own childhood in the 1990s. The only difference—and one that’s a mind trip for me to think about—is that the guys who were playing tuba in the oompah band back then are dead now, and the guys who were there with their kids in 1990 are in the oompah band (or the nursing home, or both).

The oompah band. (Source: Strong Towns/Daniel Herriges.)

The persistence of this ritual is remarkable amid all the cultural change that both St. Paul and America have experienced over several decades. But I think it’s also telling what kind of place this is. I don’t think it’s an accident that, of all the neighborhoods in my hometown, this is the one to have such a tradition. St. Anthony Park is an unusually cohesive, quite walkable, strikingly beautiful neighborhood designed according to some really robust, timeless principles. Its residents manifestly take a lot of pride in their urban village.

Okay, okay. Let’s have the caveat first: I’m not a design determinist. By that, I mean that I don’t think the way our places are designed has an overbearing influence on our values and priorities, or on our happiness. That’s lazy thinking that tends to affirm people’s worst instincts for motivated reasoning: “People who live like I think people ought to live are better/more virtuous/more community-minded people.”

There’s a huge amount of civic spirit that goes into perpetuating an event like 4th in the Park, and a lot of volunteer effort by a lot of people. You can find people like that anywhere, even in the most visually inoffensive tract subdivision of interchangeable beige houses. Urban vs. suburban culture war is a dead end. Community exists beyond and often despite the built environment. And cute Victorians do not a civic culture make. Not by themselves.

(Source: Strong Towns/Daniel Herriges.)

However, design matters. Design is how we create places that are easy to care about. In a virtuous cycle, we tend to invest in those places because we care—instead of pouring our energies into other endeavors that aren’t so place based. That effort keeps a lovable place lovable. One necessary ingredient for long-term investment in a neighborhood is emotional investment.

I have always had the impression that St. Anthony Park is the neighborhood in St. Paul whose residents identify most strongly with their neighborhood, as opposed to the city, region, or some other delineator of community. And I think this is owed in part to forward-thinking design decisions that fostered a strong sense of place.

A Thoughtful Streetcar Suburb

St. Anthony Park was one of St. Paul’s early “streetcar suburbs.” The term refers to planned neighborhoods built to take advantage of new electric streetcar service in the late 19th and early 20th century, providing upper-middle-class commuters to downtown jobs a chance to live outside of the noisy, smelly urban core. Streetcar suburbs were built by many hands over decades, but their layout and initial planning were typically the work of large-scale land developers who would buy up the land, subdivide it, and provide the streets and utilities. I wrote recently about this era in St. Paul’s development (which is mirrored in many American cities).

St. Anthony Park’s street layout was the work of Horace Cleveland, one of America’s superstar landscape architects of the late 19th century and a peer to such famous figures as Frederick Law Olmsted. (Cleveland was also the principal architect of the grand, connected urban park systems of Minneapolis and St. Paul.)

Two crucial, distinguishing features of St. Anthony Park’s original plan can be seen today by simply following the 4th of July parade route.

(Source: Strong Towns/Daniel Herriges.)

(Source: Strong Towns/Daniel Herriges.)

Commercial Core

A two-block stretch of Como Avenue serves as the heart of the neighborhood. The Fourth of July parade begins here. The commercial district is modest, but it is unusual in neighborhoods of this era in a couple of respects. For one, it is at the neighborhood’s geographic center. A more common pattern in U.S. cities is for a major commercial street to mark the periphery of a neighborhood rather than the center, meaning it doesn’t contribute in the same way to neighborhood identity. Often, too, local businesses are on a stroad with enough traffic to dissuade people from exploring on foot or lingering. Como Avenue does not have this problem (though it’s still a through street that could use some narrowing).

The small commercial district is clustered enough to provide a meaningful center of gravity for neighborhood activity: people come here for multiple purposes, so they run into each other, fostering community through serendipitous encounters. Several restaurants and cafes, a hardware store, a small but very well-stocked local grocery (I’ve joked to my family that this place is like the Room of Requirement from the Harry Potter novels), the post office, a dentist, and a bank are all on the same two blocks. Residents have every reason to frequent this area, and do.

The Strong Towns Strength Test series we wrote a decade ago asked, “If the revolution came to your town, would people instinctively know where to gather?” St. Anthony Park passes this test with flying red-white-and-blue colors, even when the gathering in question is (thankfully) the remembrance of a revolution rather than the real deal.

Location of Civic Institutions

The intersection at the heart of the neighborhood also has played host for a century to this beauty of a public library:

(Source: Wikimedia Commons/McGhiever.)

The St. Anthony Park branch library is a Carnegie Library built in 1917, and expanded in 1999. It is one of the busiest branches in the city, and more unusually, it enjoys a high degree of support from the neighborhood. As we arrived for the Fourth of July parade, my wife commented on the attractive landscaping and flower boxes in front of the library—unusual for what is presumed, in most cities, to be a cash-strapped public institution. Sure enough, it is volunteers from the neighborhood who maintain the gardens, as well as support children’s programming at the library branch.

Is this library so cared for because it is a beautiful building in a prominent neighborhood location? Or simply because it is in an affluent neighborhood with many families who value the public library as an institution? Again, I am not a simple-minded design determinist. But I do think that when you create a place that is lovable, it’s not surprising when people rally around it and love it. When you create a place that is disposable, it is far more likely to be treated as disposable. People with resources will still expend those resources to meet their needs and wants, but they won’t do it in ways that shore up the value and permanence of place.

One of the most unfortunate trends under the Suburban Experiment has been that civic functions have been, more often than not, displaced from their role of being anchors of place. Now, we just tuck them out of the way wherever we can acquire cheap land. We put them in peripheral or marginal locations, and we build mundane buildings accordingly. Not so in the pre-automobile era. The location of this library lends itself to being one stop in a multi-purpose outing on foot.

Even better than the library is the location of the elementary school: it’s in the largest neighborhood park, Langford Park. Not near the park. Not across the street from it. In it. This is a stroke of genius that makes me wonder why it isn’t a more common practice across North America. When kids are let out in the afternoon, they’re right here: in a safe place to run around and play. The community uses the school’s playground year round and after hours. The marriage of school and park gives neighborhood families an extra connection to this park, so it becomes an intuitive place to host a community festival.

A dose of reality is needed here. We’re still living in the 21st century, and people live 21st-century lives. So there is still a car pick-up line after school. People do drive to jobs outside the neighborhood. They drive to big-box stores to shop. It’s not a self-contained village; it’s part of a big metropolis.

It’s not perfect, either. Homes here are extremely expensive, and there is not a lot of newer housing (though one new mid-rise apartment building has been built right in the neighborhood’s “downtown” in recent years), and the place has its fair share of NIMBY attitudes. Because of its desirability combined with the lack of growth, St. Anthony Park is not very diverse, in terms of either income or race. (As I’ve argued before, this does not reflect a design flaw of the neighborhood but quite the opposite: we haven’t built enough places like this. So this one gets bid up by those who can afford to live in a very pleasant and picturesque neighborhood.)

But there’s a lot to learn from a neighborhood like this that is worthy of emulation. And maybe understanding those lessons begins with having a handful of Smarties and Dum-Dums chucked at your head by a giant bald eagle.

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