Suburban creep

Photos of Coney Island by Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times. The Boardwalk, the birds and the occasional lone man, walking hunched over against the biting wind.

Surf and Stillwell Avenues in Coney Island, with not much stirring. "Winter is dead," a hotel manager said. "No people are coming to the water. No one comes." From "The Cold and Lonely Side of Summer's Playland."

On Friday I spent a fair amount of time in Bethesda, trying to haul some equipment away that we bought at an auction. Bethesda is not that attractive. It's ersatz. But it isn't ersatz really, that's just what value-engineered shopping and office buildings look like, and that's what most of the U.S. looks like post-1950. Since the center cities had their heyday long before, they look better, because the sensibilities about architecture, design, and value were so much different.

An AP story reprinted in USA Today (at least online) discussed the opening of an indoor water park in Brooklyn, and referred to this as "suburban creep" of non-urban design and use types into the center cities.

I like the term.

It sums up in two words what I oppose, the creeping of automobile-centric suburban building types and land use planning paradigms, into the urban context, into the center city.

Speaking of authenticity, what about Coney Island? Of course, the disadvantage of authenticity is that you are limited by seasonality. (And for more on water parks, see this article from the NYT Travel section, "Everybody Into the (Water Park) Pool")

From the article, "Get out the water wings, NY — a theme park is coming":

In the latest bit of suburban creep into the nation's largest city, a family-themed water park is due before summer 2007 on a piece of Randalls Island parkland at the juncture of the East and Harlem Rivers, under the vast Triborough Bridge. The city hopes to lure more than 1.3 million visitors a year to the $168 million attraction that will boast water slides rising 80 feet into the skyline.

So are the five boroughs going Six Flags? A little bit, yes. And not everybody is pleased. "The citizens of New York like the Brooklyn Bridge," said Billy Tallen, a performance artist who's waged a long (and losing) battle against New York's commercialization. "The consumers prefer the water parks. We insist on being citizens, not consumers."

The water park is just the latest indignity for Tallen and others who fondly recall the corner tavern, the mom and pop drugstore, the local coffee shop. These days, it's more likely a Starbucks (159 locations in the city) or a TGIFriday's (a dozen spots, including one on 42nd Street near the Red Lobster). Last year, a 7-Eleven opened on Park Avenue South at 23rd Street — the first new Manhattan franchise for the 24-hour stores since 1982.

Ryan Donnell for The New York Times. Coyote Canyon, a water slide at the Great Wolf Lodge in Scotrun, Pa.

Index Keywords: urban-design-placemaking