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9:30am | Reflecting on recent trips to three great capital cities—Washington D.C., London, and Paris—I was struck by their strikingly divergent histories of urban planning. Central London still reflects its medieval past, with a chaotic web of streets only partially loosened by an amorphic grid. Paris’s own historic core was transformed during the reign of Napoleon; in a quintessential example of top-down master planning, grand boulevards and avenues slashed through the existing city fabric, intersecting at monuments to French pride. The designers of Washington took a page from the Parisian model of hub-and-spoke boulevards and monuments, but combined it with a practical orthogonal grid.
 
Yet despite these differences, there is something important shared by the vibrant open spaces of these three “world cities.” This common thread is one of unexpected yet creative juxtaposition: in each city, different organizing principles from different historical periods collide to create special moments sprinkled throughout urban environment. Strange traffic patterns can emerge when streets intersect at oblique angles, but sometimes the leftover spaces from these odd intersections can become great urban places. For instance, between DuPont Circle and Sheridan Square in Washington, Massachusetts Avenue and Q Street intersect in a manner that leaves a pair of small triangular spaces left over. The Massachusetts Avenue and Q Street arterials are well-designed for pedestrians, as are DuPont Circle and Sheridan Square, but the two incidental spaces are no less special. Similar situations appear frequently in Paris as well: in one case, Boulevard Saint-Germaine and the smaller Rue Gozlin graze each other at an oblique angle, leaving a remnant space called Place Jacques Copeau. Rather than fill these leftover spaces with additional turn lanes or parking lots, city planners left them as open spaces. As a result, they now brim over with pedestrian-friendly features--from outdoor dining and transit stops to bike parking--creating pockets of vibrancy in the city.
 
Of course, these sorts of accidental spaces created by overlapping city block structures are not exclusive to seats of national government. New York’s Times Square, formed by Broadway intersecting obliquely with Seventh Avenue, has become an iconic urban space drawing pedestrians from across the globe. Indeed, portions of the road have now been removed entirely to increase the possibilities for street life. Under the Spanish, Los Angeles was originally laid out with streets in a grid running from southwest to northeast. As the city expanded, new streets were laid out on a “Jeffersonian grid” matching the points of the compass, from north to south and east to west. In areas around downtown Los Angeles, the coming together of these two grids provides numerous opportunities for creating new urban plazas (for instance, along Hoover Street). Such opportunities are lost when improving traffic flow is prioritized over pedestrians.
 
These kinds of possibilities created by streets intersecting at unusual angles are not limited to the cities discussed above. From Bixby Knolls to Belmont Shore and downtown, there are multiple opportunities in Long Beach for creating parks, plazas, and squares that take advantage of the legacies of different eras of development. For instance, Livingston Street divides Belmont Shore’s compact block structure with the more typically-scaled streets of Belmont Heights. As currently configured, Livingston is oriented toward facilitating automobile traffic between Ocean Boulevard and Second Street. At present, it thus acts as a dividing line between the communities of Belmont Shore and Belmont Heights, rather than working to bind them together. With a natural grade change of over a dozen feet from one sidewalk to the other, as well as a 150-foot wide right-of-way, there is no shortage of opportunity to transform this half-mile long arterial into a wonderful greenbelt.
 
Alamitos Avenue extends from the waterfront to the Long Beach City College campus on Pacific Coast Highway. This is one of the most historic streets in Long Beach, delineating the original border between Rancho Los Cerritos and Rancho Los Alamitos, which were combined to make the original city boundary. This diagonal street slices through a half-dozen neighborhoods that house some of the most unique features in Long Beach’s urban fabric, from the historic district of Brenner Place to the pedestrian-only Toledo Walk. Recently, the city has begun to creatively leverage some of the opportunities created by Alamitos Avenue, notably at its intersections with Pacific Coast Highway where an expansive garden was created at the entrance of Barcelona Place and a new park created at 15th Street. Yet still many more intersections along Alamitos Avenue remain to be transformed to improve surrounding neighborhoods and reinforce the importance of this historic street.

While San Antonio Drive is a unique diagonal feature in the fabric of the Bixby Knolls area, the surrounding grid largely does not take advantage of the opportunities it provides. However, there do remain occasions where streets meeting at less-than-right angles with San Antonio Drive allow special places to emerge. The native California landscaping of Orange Park at the southwest corner of San Antonio’s intersection with Orange Avenue, is one such example. Other opportunities exist near the commercial districts at Atlantic Avenue and Long Beach Boulevard. Unfortunately, many of these remaining spaces are occupied by small, inefficient parking lots or unneeded additional lanes for vehicles.
 
Such problems of uninspired or inefficient use of these kinds of “angled” open spaces are not unique to Bixby Knolls; in many cases, they can easily be corrected with different surface treatments (grass versus asphalt). New York and San Francisco have provided successful examples of converting the “black-top” of parking lots and streets to temporary pedestrian plazas by just painting the asphalt area and introducing benches and tables. With good design—including landscaping, street furniture, and provisions for pedestrian-oriented activity—these small left-over spaces where street networks collide can enrich the local environment, be that environment residential or commercial in nature. It is just a matter of finding those special moments and turning them over to people.

Photo: Traffic square in Paris—carousel, Metro, bike racks, newstand and dining.

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