One Town, Two Town, Old Town, New Town
What should we think about beautiful, historic urbanism frozen in time?
Old Town Alexandria always makes me think. In recent years, the city permanently pedestrianized several blocks of King Street, the main drag of the historic city which terminates at the waterfront. That handful of blocks is lively, and beautiful. It’s lined with shops and restaurants, a handful of street performers, outdoor seating areas. There are lights strung on the trees. In the fading daylight, it’s more than just a lovely sight. It looks and feels like the definition of a city itself; a visual dictionary entry.
And a different season:
This is what urbanists mean when we talk about walkability, small scale or “fine grain,” proximity between or mixing of different uses (commercial and residential, mostly), and the public realm. None of this feels weird, or radical, or “un-American,” or “political.” It doesn’t make you think of activists or agendas or ideologies.
Rare as places like this are in America, they feel—for me, and I think for most people—absolutely and utterly normal, almost familiar even if personally unfamiliar. C.S. Lewis put this idea very nicely, speaking of the human inkling that the divine really exists: “The echo of a tune we have not heard.” That is what urbanism feels like, I think, for many of us: not just something we like, in a lifestyle sense, but something that should have been, and almost metaphysically is, our normal, our home.
Then you walk past the real estate office and look at the prices:
That’s where a lot of folks check out. Those prices—$1 million and $1.25 million—are not even for homes in Old Town. Those are at least as expensive, and smaller. These high prices seem to communicate to a lot of people that good urbanism is an expensive treat or indulgence, not a normal, everyday way to live.
But a place like Old Town Alexandria isn’t expensive because of corporate greed, or because urbanism is inherently expensive, or any other left- or right-coded reason that many people think. It’s expensive because, simply, people want to live here.
At one time, the Old Town district was rundown, and it narrowly escaped urban renewal. Some of the old city of Alexandria—which today might have been restored to be just as lovely as Old Town—was leveled. I believe there was something revolutionary and almost ideological about urban renewal. But underneath all of that, it was true that a lot of these old cities were in poor shape by the post-Depression, post-WWII 20th century.
They were perceived as being at that point of obsolescence, where it doesn’t seem worth it to fix a thing, and the new and better replacement is available. I use the analogy of tube televisions. Between maybe 2005 and 2015,
Old Town Alexandria always makes me think. In recent years, the city permanently pedestrianized several blocks of King Street, the main drag of the historic city which terminates at the waterfront. That handful of blocks is lively, and beautiful. It’s lined with shops and restaurants, a handful of street performers, outdoor seating areas. There are lights strung on the trees. In the fading daylight, it’s more than just a lovely sight. It looks and feels like the definition of a city itself; a visual dictionary entry.
And a different season:
This is what urbanists mean when we talk about walkability, small scale or “fine grain,” proximity between or mixing of different uses (commercial and residential, mostly), and the public realm. None of this feels weird, or radical, or “un-American,” or “political.” It doesn’t make you think of activists or agendas or ideologies.
Rare as places like this are in America, they feel—for me, and I think for most people—absolutely and utterly normal, almost familiar even if personally unfamiliar. C.S. Lewis put this idea very nicely, speaking of the human inkling that the divine really exists: “The echo of a tune we have not heard.” That is what urbanism feels like, I think, for many of us: not just something we like, in a lifestyle sense, but something that should have been, and almost metaphysically is, our normal, our home.
Then you walk past the real estate office and look at the prices:
That’s where a lot of folks check out. Those prices—$1 million and $1.25 million—are not even for homes in Old Town. Those are at least as expensive, and smaller. These high prices seem to communicate to a lot of people that good urbanism is an expensive treat or indulgence, not a normal, everyday way to live.
But a place like Old Town Alexandria isn’t expensive because of corporate greed, or because urbanism is inherently expensive, or any other left- or right-coded reason that many people think. It’s expensive because, simply, people want to live here.
At one time, the Old Town district was rundown, and it narrowly escaped urban renewal. Some of the old city of Alexandria—which today might have been restored to be just as lovely as Old Town—was leveled. I believe there was something revolutionary and almost ideological about urban renewal. But underneath all of that, it was true that a lot of these old cities were in poor shape by the post-Depression, post-WWII 20th century.
They were perceived as being at that point of obsolescence, where it doesn’t seem worth it to fix a thing, and the new and better replacement is available. I use the analogy of tube televisions. Between maybe 2005 and 2015,
millions of perfectly functional (and certainly slightly wonky) tube televisions were thrown away. They had virtually no value at all, except maybe a handful of top-of-the-line models and older collectible ones. This was a winnowing period. Urban renewal is very much like one of these moments during the mass adoption of a new technology and the mass throwing away of the old one.
And just as many of these technologies end up with some value down the line—tube televisions are already rising in price, to the disbelief of many—the old cities that did survive were in a few decades “rediscovered” not as leftover oddities but as actual places in which normal people could live or at least visit. It’s just that very few of them were left, and the demand did and does outstrip the supply.
In the case of the TVs and the old cities, the same escalation of prices, and the same casting about for someone to blame, happened. In the tube-TV-enthusiast community, people blame “scalpers” and “resellers” for high prices. Tube TVs are supposed to be cheap! But they were only cheap during that ultimately quite brief winnowing moment—not when they were the technology of the land, and not once they were rediscovered and become the object of nostalgia and curiosity.
This very much tracks the evolution of cities, or at least the perception of cities, from glamorous, desirable places, to burned-out hellholes, to rough places with good bones, to highly desirable places once again.
This is one of the major factors in what we call the “housing crisis.” We have fewer of the kinds of places that are increasingly in demand than we would need for those places to be “affordable.” Not affordable in the low-income sense—but in the sense that tube televisions were once reasonably priced and abundant. The housing crisis is largely our very slow process of trying to undo the winnowing moment that old urbanism went through. To heal, as I think of it, a schism with ourselves.
But of course, one of the questions that arises is, where does that much-needed new housing go? Some of it sprawls—and while many people really do like suburban sprawl, a lot of people settle for it, which in turn means that some percentage of sprawl is really misplaced urban housing. Some of it goes in brownfields or vacant lots or conversions from offices or industrial uses in legacy cities.
Should any of it go in places like Old Town Alexandria?
Would it be “fair” or “right” to develop Old Town into skyscrapers? It isn’t possible to hold a fixed amount of space at a reasonable price when more and more people want it. Supply and demand are real things—they are really explanatory of human behavior. Look at how people bid up the prices of things on eBay. It happens without corporations being involved. If you flooded Old Town with housing units, it would get cheaper. (Depending on demand, prices might hold steady, or might increase at a slower rate, but these are still supply and demand working.)
But heavy densification within the existing built fabric would kill the uniqueness of Old Town, which is, of course, much of why it is desirable in the first place. That is what NIMBYs say—our place is too special to change—but I do think there’s a real tension here. Many of the places that seem to be located well for densification are also some of the loveliest, oldest, and most genuinely urban places in America.
On the other hand, if we had not had that winnowing period and that break in continuity with the legacy cities, their neighborhoods would have churned and changed as they always did, and there would perhaps not even be an “Old Town Alexandria” as we know it today. And nobody would have perceived any loss, because that change would have been distributed and organic, just the background hum of a city as a living place. The street of Theseus.
So the tension is between understanding cities as real, evolving, alive places versus trying to keep the very best examples of urbanism as they are. The concept of historic districts turns neighborhoods into artifacts, which runs counter to the fundamental idea of urbanism. Yet the built forms of our surviving historic cities are some of the finest examples of American urbanism ever built. Which is more important, ultimately: the outward form, or the inward substance?
I would like to think that we can have it both ways. We should try to build more places like Old Town, not turn places like Old Town into Manhattan. I think. There is also no shortage of underbuilt, underutilized no-man’s-land in America that could one day become thriving, low-intensity urbanism of the Old Town or classic Main Street sort. Such places wouldn’t have the same pedigree, but they could easily capture the same design elements and some of the architectural styles. That, basically, is New Urbanism, but more comprehensive and normative. It isn’t rocket science. It’s only politically, not technically, difficult.
Above all, this is what I take away from a visit to Old Town: that America once had innumerable places like this, which were unremarkable because they were simply what an urban settlement was. They were certainly less pleasant, too, because of horses, and heavy industry, and the absence of many modern innovations.
It is a shame that just as we were becoming rich, and had all of the technology needed to make city life a little calmer and nicer, we reached the winnowing era of the automobile age and suburbia. Had the timing been a little different, we might have seen more value in the old cities. Had the Depression and the war not happened, cities might have been continuously maintained and iterated, not stagnated. Who knows.
Old Town Alexandria is lovely. But it should not be unique, or even special. It isn’t a treat, or a curiosity, or an antique, or a playground. It’s a little aching look at what many of once had, but could not see, and what all of us could still have, if we let ourselves.
Related Reading:
Car-Free Cities Don’t Feel “Radical”