Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
A good analogue to State Street would be Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn. Both were department store laden high streets that went into deep postwar decline, and converted to pedestrian malls in the late 70's. Both were kinda honky tonk and particularly popular with African American shoppers (which, frankly, probably drove some white shoppers away).
But Fulton Street never removed its pedestrian mall, and it, like State Street, is healthier than 20 years ago, and, in particular, more upscale and different demographic.
Downtown Crossing in Boston would be another example, and followed similar trajectory. Still a pedestrian mall, and improved/upscaled from past years.
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perhaps state street would have rebounded on its own had its pedestrian mall been left intact, but we'll never know.
another aspect to consider here is street-scale. the building-to-building street-wall widths of boston crossing vary between 40' - 60'. fulton street in brooklyn is ~75'. but state street in chicago is a a much grander-scaled ~120' wide.
one of the most common complaints of the state street ped mall was that it typically felt too wide-open and empty and desolate. maybe it wasn't as appropriately human-scaled as those east coast examples (where, across the board, street ROW's are noticeably tighter than chicago)? maybe state street as a 3/4 mile-long ped mall was too wide and too long and generally too over-scaled to ever get enough critical mass in any one spot to get the fire started? maybe it just felt too quiet and dead without the commotion of cars going up and down the street? i don't know, just thinking out loud......
either way, the state street ped mall is long gone, and it ain't ever coming back (not in any of our lifetimes, anyway), and the street is doing much better today than at any point during its ped mall days.
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