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,