By Danny Mayer
Like nearly all towns on the American frontier, Lexington, Kentucky was platted on a map before it actually was developed as a real town. And like other frontier towns, its development was orderly, more or less, so as to facilitate both economic and demographic growth. The map decreed that downtown “city” lots, where city commerce would take place, be a half acre in size. Roughly speaking, this was the area located a block above (Short Street) and below (Town Branch, now Vine Street) Main Street between Thoroughbred and Triangle Parks. On the city’s periphery, which in 1800 would have been Second Street, lots were split into five-acre “out-lots,” upon which Lexington’s earliest white citizens would build their houses and house their slaves to pimp them out at cut-rate prices to the city’s developing merchant class. Many years later, as lots on Second and Third Streets were being subdivided into new majestic houses, the city’s new suburbs—behind Third Street in Smithtown or in the East End in Kincaidtown—were places of racialized separation, kept close enough to perform the required tasks of the new (now paid) labor class. Even majestic—and now decidedly urban—downtown streets like Second, Third and beyond, it seems, are structurally built upon sound suburban design principals.
While houses like the Kincaid House (aka the Living Arts and Science Center), alleys like Smith Alley (which housed urban slave labor) and neighborhoods called the East End (Kincaidtown and others) offer visible reminders of this past, the early suburban gridding of Lexington is most evident in the layout of Lexington’s downtown streets, which for the most part have remained as they were designed over three centuries ago. Traveling up North Limestone from Main Street, for example, a discerning inhabitant is sure to notice how Lexington’s city blocks get considerably larger once one leaves the old half-acre lots of the city’s original mercantile downtown and begins to hit the vulgar frontier suburbs of Second and Third Streets, on the west side of town, and the MLK and N. Limestone neighborhoods on the east side.
Landscape historian J.B. Jackson, who spent much of his life looking at distinct places and trying to figure out how they worked, would undoubtedly describe downtown Lexington as, essentially, a political space: a “well defined, permanent, established village or town or landscape, self-sufficient, well-adjusted, and happily conscious of its unique quality.” He defined such landscapes—streets, monuments, town centers, mansions, picturesque boulevards— as “political” because they are “maintained and governed by law and political institutions.” In addition to the tyranny of political landscapes, Jackson also noted the presence of “[a] vernacular landscape, identified with local custom, pragmatic adaptation to circumstances and unpredicted mobility.” Vernacular landscapes, for Jackson, were about making things new—buildings, ways of inhabitation, forms of community—and they were “resisted by the political landscape.”
Though he is quick to note the power of law and political institutions to protect landscapes that it deems important, we also might add that such landscapes owe their permanence to accumulated wealth—which of course has the ability both to maintain “aesthetic” or “historic” structures and to purchase unwanted structures and tear them down.
Good urban design: A tale of two walks
Since moving to our new home on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard two years ago, Saturdays have become market day. I grab a couple market bags and begin my walk past the Episcopal Diocese and the Living Arts and Science Center (the Kincaid house) at Fourth and MLK, where I head west a block and then south onto N. Limestone to Third Street Coffee to purchase a paper. Leaving Third Street, I continue south down N. Lime. As a treat, I may stop at Sunrise on Main Street, though often the Saturday crowds are large, and I can buy their bread, baguettes or sourdough, at other stops along my walk, so I stay away.
My next stop is the market. In summer, the market is teeming with shoppers and songsters and jugglers and vendors, and I wade in and bump into many friends. I bring a set amount of cash each week to spend, often on non-produce items: meat items like chicken from Carey Farms or Elmwood, brats from Blue Moon and pork from the pork guy; canned items like mustard and apple butter and jams; impulse items a fire baked pizza or a fried apple pie; necessary items like bread, eggs and any herbs or peppers I didn’t grow from seed.
In winter, when the market locates to Victorian Square, the market is much less crowded—empty, actually. I often wonder, as I purchase my potatoes, greens, eggs, meat, bread and other items, why people do not come out in the winter. Do they not eat? I ask the egg lady and she says that at first many farmers showed up, but that Lexington buyers did not. Their loss is my gain—quick winter trips to the market are a seasonal delicacy.
In all seasons, after market I make my way across Broadway to Wine+Market, where I try to do as much of my normal grocery shopping as possible: a hunk of pecorino and blue danish cheeses, flour, chorizo, milk, dried fruit, sliced deli meat, or any other necessaries they carry. My way back—fucking long suburban blocks—my back is drenched and my bags are at risk of tearing some key seams. I walk past the intact mansions on Second and up through the beautiful homes on Gratz before reconnecting with N. Lime and funneling back home. I’m usually gone two hours.
I find it funny that this would be considered an urban narrative, the urban livability we all desire, found through the use of the city’s strategic and historic design. Three summers ago my wife and I moved from a 1960s suburban ranch home located off Liberty Road. In that it was a suburb built in the 60s, the neighborhood was the “political space” of the day, built for a white Lexington population fleeing the city core. At the time, the 1960s, US demographics were in the midst of big changes: the country’s wealth was moving to the suburbs, and its poverty was getting further concentrated in its city core (and rural areas, but that’s another story). What was deemed desirable—and in large part aesthetically acceptable—was the suburban ideal of larger lawns and drivable shopping centers.
Such design aesthetics, we are now told, are not conducive to proper ways of living—building strong communities, developing close economic ties with small scale shop keepers that enrich the local community, cutting down on carbon footprints.
I used to believe it, too, until I realized the immense walkability of my bleak suburban neighborhood. Unlike my current prolonged twenty-five minute one-way (nonstop) urban market walk, my suburban home afforded me a fish market (Charlie’s), several taquerias (depending on whether I cut through to Winchester or New Circle Road), and joy of joys, Eastland Shopping Center, a drab strip mall located on the inside edge of New Circle Road.
I used to visit Eastland quite a bit, cutting through a back parking lot, where I had constructed a guerrilla garden bed full of romas and basil, and across five lanes of Winchester traffic at the stoplight (a not terribly threatening or un-pedestrian thing to do, by the way). I normally did this to eat at Enza’s, an Italian restaurant now closed. The cook, Curtis, and I traded basil (from my guerrilla garden) and mozzeralla balls (homemade by him). While there, I might visit the knife shop to sharpen my knives, or the SavALot, the African grocery store, the shoe repair shop or Roberts Health Food Store—all located closer to my home than the distant Wine+Market.
I’m running out of space here, so I’ll just get to the point of all this. I’ve done both walks, now, many times, and I can say without a doubt that what we are told is valued in the city, and what we are told the aesthetics of the city allow to happen—cross-cultural connections, concentrated shopping, a return to a more localized way of life—is precisely what I see less of in downtown Lexington, and precisely what I saw more of at Eastland: middle class folks of all colors and nationalities owning small business and shopping at local shops. And what I’m seeing is backed up in statistics, which has found that, in the past decade, demographics have switched. Poverty is moving to the suburbs. Cities are becoming increasingly more wealthy as, in the words of one report, a “bright flight” has brought in young adults, mostly white, who see “access to knowledge based jobs, public transportation and a new city ambiance as an attraction.” The fallout of this new wealth infusion is that cities have become too expensive to house the kind of small-scale amenities that places like cheaper suburban strip-malls like Eastland can attract.
We should all know something is up when Lexington punks, the white group most often seeking out spaces of social and economic abjection, have begun to move en masse into the suburbs, to what’s being called the punk rock retirement community. We should also know something is up when our downtown leaders—designers, politicians, university academics—begin denigrating the places real little-guy entrepreneurs are inhabiting.
I recently went back to Eastland and looked around. It’s quite the vernacular landscape. Enzas is gone, but everything else is there, including a Rite Aid drug store and Nana’s African and Caribbean. Meanwhile, down in the livable city, a minor investor of the CVS, in denigrating the poor suburban aesthetics of the CVS design, has played up the “success” of bringing Krispy Kreme to anchor his recently built, aesthetically urban, and above market value downtown lofts.
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