“Compared with New York, the District might lack a real Chinatown and authentic bagel shops, but all that doesn’t really matter when we don’t even have enough space to walk around. I realized this recently when visiting a friend in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, a mix of rowhouses, restaurants and small businesses similar to my neighborhood, Adams Morgan. But in Brooklyn, as I traveled from stores to restaurants to the subway, I felt oddly comfortable walking. Unlike in most D.C. neighborhoods, I had plenty of room to walk, even though many people were on the sidewalks that Sunday afternoon. Everywhere we went, I noticed how wide the sidewalks were. The sidewalk on my friends’ street was easily 12 feet wide, even though the street had only rowhouses on one side and a park on the other — no businesses or bus stops.”–Washington Post
Bklink: Easier to Walk in Park Slope than DC?
August 10th, 2008 · 2 Comments
Tags: Park Slope · Urban Planning
2 responses so far ↓
1 RKD // Aug 12, 2008 at 10:21 am
Interesting profiles of pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods around the country at walkscore.com
2 Laura // Aug 12, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Interesting. As a Native New Yorker, then 3 year DC resident, and now in Park Slope for a year, I found my neighborhood of DC (Logan Circle) vaguely comparable to Park Slope. DC seemed to have wider and smoother sidewalks than Park Slope (I find the sidewalks here to be in horrendous shape!), but a less interesting streetscape. Another thing the NYC as a whole beats DC on (one of many…) is sidewalk access during construction. In DC, pedestrians are often forced onto the street, unprotected, or told to cross to the other side when there’s work being done to a building on one side of the street. NYC is much better at providing covered diversionary walkways. Park Slope, and NYC as a whole, has a much greater volume and variety of activity corridors – in DC, most of the action (nightlife, shopping) is clustered around a few key intersections, making for a very hectic sidewalk scene in these areas, juxtaposed against relatively abandoned streets elsewhere after-hours (think about if over half the city had Wall Street’s hours).