The Planning Fetish: Comprehensive Plans

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A guest post by Jennifer Hurley AICP, CNUa, PP, sent via channels affiliated with CNU NextGen. Although I didn’t write this, I agree wholeheartedly based on my experience working in several cities with varying degrees of commitment to comprehensive planning.

Planners have a fetish about comprehensive plans. Their belief in the power of comprehensive plans and their obsession with creating comprehensive plans illustrates what anthropologists call “magical thinking.”

Comprehensive planning as taught in most planning schools is a failed institution. I’ll pause for the collective gasp. Unless required by state law, most communities undertake a comprehensive planning process rarely, if ever. For years, planners have bemoaned this state of affairs—if people only understood what we do and how it benefits them. To address the lack of interest in comprehensive planning, planners have taken a marketing and education approach, trying to persuade people that we have a product they need.

But the market is telling us something. Maybe we should listen. If comprehensive plans were truly useful and a good return on investment, communities would presumably clamor for their creation. So why don’t communities “do” comprehensive planning?

Comprehensive Planning is too expensive. Being thorough in scope, data analysis, public participation, policy formulation, and urban design is incredibly expensive. It takes a great deal of technical expertise and time. Only a few communities can afford to do it at all, and even those only occasionally.

Comprehensive Planning is exhausting. In addition to the expense and exhaustion, comprehensive planning is no fun. Planning staff, public officials, and the public experience burnout. Once they complete the plan, they don’t want to touch it again for years.

Comprehensive Planning is not effective. Most comprehensive plans sit on a shelf rather than motivate people to action. The thoroughness of comprehensive plans means that few people have the time or attention to read the document, and no one uses it as a ready reference. Planning Departments often specify in Requests for Proposals that they want a plan that is “implementable”, gets used, and does not “just sit on a shelf.” They know what they do not want, but they do not know what to ask for in its place.

How can planners overcome these weaknesses in conventional comprehensive planning? The answer lies in understanding “plan” in its verb form rather than its noun form. The “plan” itself is simply a byproduct, not the most important outcome, of good planning. The most important task of comprehensive planning is to develop extensive understanding and not just to include everything and the kitchen sink.

Planners can provide value, improve the communities in which they work, and raise the profile the planning profession by focusing on three basic aspects of good planning.

Visioning: A community, group, organization, etc. needs a shared vision of the future they hope to reach. A vision is what people see when they can imagine that all of the constraints of today have fallen away. The community’s vision is not merely an amalgamation of many individuals’ visions, but something larger that individuals uncover and build together through group efforts. A concrete, articulated vision gives people a goal, a collective sense of direction, and a reason for moving forward through hard work. Achieving that specific vision is not important; in fact, the changing environment almost guarantees that any vision we articulate today will be out of date in the time it takes to achieve it. What is important about the vision is the motivation and collective goal it provides.

Relationship & Community Building: Community and the relationships that make up community comprise the living, breathing organism through which we carry out action. We need to leverage our targeted, short-term planning processes and interventions to build stronger relationships, healthier communities, and organizational capacity. The effects of a planning process reverberate through an area for years, possibly decades. Long after the specific details and data are obsolete, the quality of the experience, the institutions nurtured, and the relationships built through the process shape the future.

Strategic Action Planning: Strategic Planning involves analyzing various aspects of the environment, including physical, social, economic, political, etc., to evaluate how they affect realization of the vision. Action Planning creates a vital roadmap for immediate next steps. Putting one foot in front of the other, over and over again, is the only way things get done. The institutionalization of repeated rounds of Strategic Action Planning transforms planning from its noun form (an occasional process resulting in a static product) into its verb form (an ongoing method for acting in the world).

The world needs planners and planning. We owe it to the communities in which we work to provide effective planning. We cannot allow our blind faith to deprive the world of good planning.

Map: mortgage interest deduction underwrites suburbs

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Mortgage interest deduction amounts by ZIP

See those donut holes? Inner-city areas with low rates of homeownership, low incomes (and thus fewer residents who itemize deductions), and relatively lower property values are receiving far less of America’s fattest housing subsidy — the mortgage-interest personal income tax deduction (see previous discussion) — than their better-off suburbs. The sprawl subsidies continue apace.

The bigger picture is that this is a subsidy that overwhelmingly benefits wealthy people who have expensive houses, and big mortgages to match — and thus benefits “coastal elites” more.

Map from the Pew Center on the States’ report “The Geographic Distribution of the Mortgage Interest Deduction” (PDF).

War or not, it’s working

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“…because the mayor hasn’t declared a war on cars. I doubt that anyone disagrees that we need to reduce traffic. I would call it an effort to get people to use alternative transportation.” – Mayor Vincent Gray, 20 February 2013

Okay, so I think we’ve established that there is no war on cars. But call it what you will, “efforts to get people to use alternative transportation” do seem to be working quite well, as steep declines in people using cars to get to work (lighter lines) are declining vs. people using “sweet modes” increases (from MWCOG research):

How Washington, D.C. residents get to work

One net result is that the doom-and-gloom traffic apocalypse predictions are now no longer valid. Even if VMT resumes its 40-year upward track — an exceedingly unlikely occurrence given recent trends — the past several years of flat or declining VMT has permanently dented the total, and therefore the amount of road space needed in the future (from OSPIRG):

VMT increase projections

Driving is not coming back. It’s time to get used to it.

Signals across the urban archipelago

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City DOT commissioners panel

A recurring theme that I keep hearing about in 2013 is that cities — linked together through national and global networks — must assert a leadership role in conceiving and implementing the policy changes necessary to adapt to the 21st century. Not only have these changes become too great to ignore, but the federal government that led America through the last great era of socioeconomic upheaval (the consolidation of the United States into the world’s industrial superpower) is mired in deep paralysis. Although states are meant to be the “laboratories of democracy,” they suffer from the same hyper-partisan paralysis and an institutional bias against metropolitan regions.

As a recent Economist editorial put it: “the rest of the country is starting to tackle some of its deeper competitive problems. Businesses and politicians are not waiting for the federal government to ride to their rescue… Pressed for cash, states are adopting sweeping reforms as they vie to attract investments and migrants… creative policymaking is being applied to the very problems Congress runs away from, like infrastructure spending.”

Taking a cue from a sharply partisan 2004-election postmortem by Dan Savage and the editors of The Stranger, we live in an era of The Urban Archipelago:

If Democrats and urban residents want to combat the rising tide of red that threatens to swamp and ruin this country, we need a new identity politics, an urban identity politics, one that argues for the cities, uses a rhetoric of urban values, and creates a tribal identity for liberals that’s as powerful and attractive as the tribal identity Republicans have created for their constituents… We’re going to demand that the Democrats focus on building their party in the cities while at the same time advancing a smart urban-growth agenda that builds the cities themselves.

This approach was plainly evident in the closing panel at NACTO’s Designing Cities conference, where as Angie Schmitt reports, “transportation chiefs from Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago and New York all talked about the progress their cities have made and shared their frustration at the lack of attention to cities and transportation in the state and national political arenas.”

“Why aren’t state governments and Congress keeping up with cities? Chicago DOT Commissioner Gabe Klein proposed that it’s because city residents — especially younger residents and entrepreneurs — expect their mayors and city governments to move at a much, much faster pace. City governments have to be much more creative and nimble to respond to these demands or else risk losing the residents and businesses that power their economies.” Yet, that agility doesn’t extend to the federal level: as Randy Neufeld said, “the disconnect seems to be Congress being out of touch with the good stuff happening on the ground.”

At the conference’s opening keynote, USDOT secretary Ray LaHood bemoaned that he would have preferred to do even more to support local government innovation, but that Congress had always “taken care of our infrastructure needs — right up to this moment in history.” Indeed, he singled out “this particular Congress” as having a peculiarly awful track record at passing transportation legislation.

The bond analysts at S&P concur that devolution of authority from the federal government will continue, reports Ashley Halsey in the Post: “The burden to finance infrastructure projects will fall more heavily on local government entities or users in the form of higher rates or tolls.”

A natural follow-up to the NACTO meeting came at TRB a few months later, where Bruce Katz addressed a substantially similar crowd at the Transportation Issues in Major Cities committee meeting. In summing up his forthcoming book, he strenuously argued that federal government are paralyzed by dysfunction, states refuse to adapt to the new metropolitan reality (and indeed, many state legislatures are backsliding), and need to be bypassed if cities are to successfully adapt to new global realities. The good news is that cities are in fact stepping up — even though they usually haven’t been empowered to do so.

(This comes with a huge caveat: ultimately, even a paralyzed state is a sovereign unit — quite unlike a city, whose municipal charter [particularly in a Dillon’s Rule state] may be tremendously limiting. And it is much more difficult to do a 50-state campaign, or even a 20-state campaign, than a single national campaign.)

How can citizens and local government officials respond? We can set up peer-to-peer innovation networks so that innovations can spread more quickly and easily between cities. States and national governments can no longer be counted on to scale up innovations, but we also no longer need them to do so.

We won’t be able to innovate our way out of every intractable problem — but with a fresh understanding of the problems, we may be able to find new resources to bring to bear. For example, Janette Sadik-Khan summed up her department’s super-effective work in three broad steps:
1. Leveraging existing assets: a holistic approach to street space manages to do more with less; “back to basics” means that feet come first; local & state governments already spend $2 in general funds on transportation for every $1 in road user fees and should expect greater accountability
2. Working nimbly: in times of austerity, we can’t afford not to work smarter, not harder (echoed by Rina Cutler from Philadelphia as “we cannot not fix” urban infrastructure, and by Gabe Klein, who contrasted the old capital-intensive approach with new ways that resemble “marketing, change management, public relations, and sales”)
3. Transforming the city: Mayor Bloomberg noted that the city has surpassed records for population & GRP, but has experienced the safest five-year period in its history and has successfully directed all new travel demand onto transit.

(About the title: a friend of mine grew up in Windward, the collection of damp suburbs east of Honolulu. There, TV and radio signals from Honolulu, just five miles away, are blocked by a mountain range, so instead residents watched TV from Maui, a hundred miles away across the flat ocean. Such is life in an archipelago: sometimes we have more in common with people far away than those just on the other side of the ridge. Our cities have more to learn from one another than from their hinterlands.)

Parks are free, right?

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Stripey
See those high-rises? They paid for Millennium Park.

And this month’s award for Not Getting the Point goes to:

“The idea that McMillan could be Washington’s Millennium Park or High Line, that kind of creativity has never come to the project,” [John] Salatti [of Bloomingdale] says.

Not only does he want a free park instead of taxpaying development on a decrepit old industrial site that the District needs to develop to meet its own revenue projections. Not only that, but he wants a park on par with two fabulously expensive parks: $475 million and $250 million apiece just for construction, plus ~$9 million a year apiece in maintenance, and all even though his neighborhood is a half-hour stroll from the National Mall, which is not only about as big as Grant Park and Central Park combined, but might have a few world-class attractions of its own. (And yes, in fact, building The Park Of Their Dreams on the unstable structure and soils at the Sand Filtration Plant would in fact cost somewhere in the nine figures.)

No, the real stupidity lies in his ignorance of park financing. Both of those parks were largely paid for by lining said parks with skyscrapers: Millennium Park with revenue from the Central Loop TIF, bolstered by 80-story towers that boast park views, and parking garages underneath it that serve the adjacent downtown; the High Line only became possible by selling its underlying development rights and upzoning some adjacent areas by 50% to permit residential towers in an industrial zone.

It seems especially rich when these NIMBYs lash out in ad hominem attacks that impugn the ethics of anyone (including me) who disagrees with them: obviously, they must be paid off by the greedy developer, since money is apparently the only possible motivation. These folks know something about selfishness: They want city taxpayers to lavish hundreds of millions of dollars to beautify their backyard, in addition to foregoing a considerable opportunity cost from new development.

Diseases of affluence cured by…

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removing affluence, of course. Or, put another way, saving money can sometimes save lives.

Population-wide interventions (in this case severe austerity) reduced chronic disease burden in the very unique case of Cuba’s “special period,” an economic catastrophe that struck a society that is peculiarly undemocratic, resilient, and underpinned by strong public health resources (and thus has excellent data). From Richard Schiffman in The Atlantic, summarizing an article by Manuel Franco, Usama Bilal, et al in BMJ:

that the health of Cubans actually improved dramatically during the years of austerity… based on nationwide statistics from the Cuban Ministry of Public Health, together with surveys conducted with about 6,000 participants in the city of Cienfuegos, on the southern coast of Cuba, between 1991 and 2011. The data showed that, during the period of the economic crisis, deaths from cardiovascular disease and adult-onset type 2 diabetes fell by a third and a half, respectively. Strokes declined more modestly, and overall mortality rates went down… The Cuban experience suggests that to seriously make a dent in these problems, we’ll have to change the lifestyle that helps to cause them. The study’s authors recommend “educational efforts, redesign of built environments to promote physical activity, changes in food systems, restrictions on aggressive promotion of unhealthy drinks and foods to children, and economic strategies such as taxation.” […] If the United States want to stem the rise of diabetes and heart disease, either we get serious about finding ways for to become more physically active and to eat fewer empty calories — or we wait for economic collapse to do that work for us.

The authors (and I) do not condone replicating the Special Period crisis, but as a data-collection exercise it is unique in providing a look at the effects of unprecedented, population-scale, sudden change in both diet and exercise. The primary cause of removing fossil energy had a secondary effect of removing food energy from the economic system, as well, and increasing its expenditure to make up for the lost fossil fuel. The accompanying video (at the BMJ site) has interesting graphs of how the entire population’s BMI shifted both during and after the Special Period.

Walking to DCA, and driving away

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[Part of an occasional series of FAQs about traveling to Washington, D.C. For more, please click on the “dc-faqs” tag above. Updated September 2023]

For those arriving/departing DCA on beautiful days like today, you might be interested in walking or cycling (perhaps using the marvelous Capital Bikeshare system) to DCA. It’s not just possible, it’s really pretty easy and fairly well signed. Indeed, it may be America’s most pedestrian friendly major airport. Note that there are multiple approaches, depending on where you’re coming from and where you’re going.

It takes about 20 minutes to walk to the airport from the nearest points of interest, which are Crystal City or Gravelly Point.

Where you’re going:
Concourse A is at the south end, Concourse C is at the north end, and B is closer to the north. Higher gate numbers are north.

As of this writing, American Airlines is at the north end (C/B), Delta, JetBlue, Alaska, and United in B, and everyone else in A.

Where you’re coming from:
1. From northern Crystal City, via the Mount Vernon Trail access at the Water Park/18th St. S., this map shows two route options:

DCA walk/bike access route

The yellow route is the signed route from the Mount Vernon Trail, without any grade crossings. It’s reasonably direct for cyclists approaching from the south, but for pedestrians from the north it adds almost 1/2 mile (and even more for people headed to the south pier or Terminal A).

The yellow route has (as of 2020) a bikeshare station alongside it.

The red route is much more direct for those coming from Crystal City (to the north) but requires jaywalking across a three high-speed roads, each one 1-2 lanes and with okay sight lines. Use extreme caution.

2. From southern Crystal City, or for the south end of the airport (Terminal A, south parking garage & car rentals), start at the sand volleyball courts and walk along the northbound exit ramp, over the Airport Access Road bridge, and follow the signs around the offices to the terminal.

There is a Capital Bikeshare kiosk next to the sand volleyball courts, or use the one next to the garage on the yellow route above.

3. From points north along the Mount Vernon Trail, like Rosslyn, D.C., and Gravelly Point, you can also exit the Mount Vernon Trail into the airport employee parking lot at the airport’s north end. (There are usually American Eagle regional jets parked behind the fence here, right next to the trail.) Just follow the sidewalk alongside the airport offices to Concourse C.

There are Capital Bikeshare kiosks at Gravelly Point, north of the airport, or on the west side of the parking garage along the yellow route highlighted above.

(Another transportation option: Gravelly Point has a small boat launch; I’ve docked an inflatable kayak there, then walked it the one mile to DCA’s Metro station.)

4. From points south along the Mount Vernon Trail, the trail directly crosses a spur to Aviation Circle at the airport’s south end, by the Signature Flight Support building. Just exit the trail there and head north along Aviation to the concourses.

Once you’re on airport grounds, there’s adequate signage along the walkways, several outdoor bike racks, and a shuttle bus connects the concourse curbsides, rental car center, and Metro entrance. In most cases, walking is just as fast as waiting for the shuttle.

Driving away

DCA’s easy accessibility opens up another multimodal possibility: car rentals. In particular, Hotwire and CarRentals.com weekend-special rates from DCA can often be found for around $10-15 (+ required fees = $30); these rates are generally available Friday morning to Monday morning, and sometimes at the last minute on weekdays.

Note: At peak times, e.g., when daily car rental rates exceed $30-40, it might be cheaper to use Car2Go, Zipcar, or Turo. Plus, you might save the hassle of getting to the airport.

If you prepay online, check-in takes a few minutes at an automated kiosk, and the cars are parked upstairs; the entire process takes about 10 minutes. The car rental center is in the south parking garage, across from Concourse A and near the south exit of the Metro station (map).

Driving part way in

Coming to town by car, but don’t want to deal with traffic once here? Good move. However, parking will still be a hassle — particularly on-street, between residential permits, rush hour restrictions, street cleaning restrictions, bad signage, and assorted scratches and dings.

So how about park-and-ride? The problem with this approach is that you’re competing with countless commuters; hence, most areas within easy walking distance of Metro will either have paid parking or some kind of permit system. A quick glance at DC’s permit parking map confirms that nothing within a few miles of downtown has free-to-the-public street parking.

I think it’s worth a few dollars to not worry about being towed, sideswiped, etc. Indeed, there are some reasonably priced garages that allow overnight parking. (Overnight parking at Metro-run lots is so limited that it’s just not worth trying.)

  • Free weekend parking, Friday evening through Monday morning, at Crystal City. Very convenient to the Mall and DCA.
  • $7/day at New Carrollton. Better yet, many northbound Amtrak trains stop here, including those to BWI.
  • $8/day at Eisenhower Avenue Metro. Close to I-95 for those approaching from the south, not a bad trip to DCA (and less than half as expensive).
  • Maryland SHA runs a bunch of free parking lots for its commuter buses, but these are mostly pretty far from metro DC.
  • $5/day at several non-WMATA garages (with fewer rules about overnight parking) along the Silver Line and Dulles Toll Road, such as Wiehle/Reston Station or those in Loudoun County.

Flying in: the river visual approach

2011.11.27-IMG_5255

The flight approaches to DCA fly over the Potomac River, in order to avoid noise impacts over the city and to avoid flights over “P-56” (aka the Monumental Core). If winds are from the south/east, flights will land from the north and take off to the south. Planes are closer to the ground during landing than during take-off, so if you have this landing you’ll be treated to fantastic views of central D.C. (on the left side) and Arlington (on the right side) in the last few minutes of flight.

As a planner, I find it fascinating to watch the cityscape unfold:
– the topographical shift, from hilly up by Great Falls through to Georgetown, then the coastal flats below
– the formal straight lines of the Mall and L’Enfant Plan, reinforced by the dense built fabric, and on the other side the curves of Arlington Cemetery and its riverfront roads
– tracing the lines of activity and development along roads like Wisconsin and Connecticut, and the Metro subway lines
– the D.C. skyline of public monuments and churches, and how close planes fly to Rosslyn’s office towers
– further out, the clear distinction between preserved farmland in Maryland and suburban sprawl in Virginia

Where are some hotel values around D.C.?

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[Part of an occasional series of FAQs about traveling to Washington, D.C. For more, please click on the “dc-faqs” tag above.]

Washington is a huge destination for business travelers, so hotels tend to be expensive — especially during the spring and autumn peak seasons of March-June and September-October.

If you are at all flexible in the times that you can visit, you can find much better prices on hotels on weekends and during Congressional holidays — particularly in August and around Christmas, Thanksgiving, and other major holidays. Transient Washingtonians tend to leave town to visit families elsewhere during major holidays and even summer weekends. The busiest holidays are the patriotic ones (Independence Day, Memorial Day, Inauguration Day), and the spring season due to an influx of visitors for cherry blossoms and spring break.

Almost all hotels I’ve visited will welcome guests on bikes; usually into the room, sometimes into a ground-floor storage room. At the Watergate Hotel, which overlooks C&O milepost zero, the valet parking attendant once cheerfully welcomed me and offered to store my bike. Still, it’s best to double-check with a call or message before arriving.

The most reliably affordable, quality (3* to 5*) hotels are those in Arlington’s Crystal City neighborhood, often marketed as being near National Airport. There are thousands of hotel rooms there, with most major U.S. chains represented, and except during conventions or other big events they rarely completely sell out. That means that you can often use Hotwire or Priceline to get low rates.*

What’s more, Crystal City is very conveniently located right on two Metro lines, less than 15 minutes from the Mall. It’s also just off I-395 and offers free weekend garage parking. Capital Bikeshare docks around the neighborhood make it easy to get onto the riverfront trail network (five miles from C&O milepost zero) or to shops in neighboring Pentagon City. Arlington is almost laughably safe. The downside is that it’s not the most scenic neighborhood: it’s almost entirely concrete towers from the 1970s and 1980s, and interior renovations haven’t appreciably improved that aesthetic. Since the surroundings are mostly offices, it’s really quiet on evenings and weekends. There are a few restaurants there, so you won’t go hungry, and there’s a major mall half a mile away at Pentagon City, but most locals will stifle a yawn at the very mention of “Crystal City.”

Just on the other side of the city, Silver Spring has a few hotels. It’s a livelier area than Crystal City, but historically their rates have been higher as well.

Within the city, the prime neighborhoods within or adjacent to downtown (including Dupont, West End, and Georgetown) often move in lockstep, so there are few bargains to be found. Dupont has some quirkier boutique options; Kimpton Hotels, in particular, has converted several 1960s studio apartment buildings in the neighborhood into themed hotels that have quite spacious rooms, if spare common facilities.

There’s a cluster of cheap motels along New York Avenue NE; these hotels often market themselves as “near Union Station.” Beware of the low prices: NY Avenue is a loud, busy highway (completely unsuited to bikes) that offers little connection to the rest of the city, and some of these hotels have a seedy reputation.

Similarly, there are dozens of hotels around the other two large airports, Dulles and Baltimore-Washington. These are generally very inconvenient to D.C.: getting to/from town requires going to the airport, then paying extra for transit service into town. I’d book a room near BWI before Dulles, and even then it would have to be at a steep ($50+) discount to justify the added travel time and cost. Although in theory both airport areas have bike facilities,

You can also, of course, look for alternative lodging arrangements like AirBNB** or Couchsurfing or even camping.

* Affiliate link to BetterBidding, a useful site if you want to try and discern the identity of a hotel before you bid
** Affiliate link that could benefit me, but probably won’t

Same road safety crisis + different contexts = different results

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When urban America motorized in the 1920s, it faced a crisis of children crushed by cars, with 7,000 deaths in 1925. Our solution then was to blame the victim, ban pedestrians from the streets invented for them myriad years ago, and turn over the roads to cars. Today, ~7,000 pedestrians each year still die on American streets, in addition to the untold violence our auto-centric transport system wreaks upon local and global ecosystems. This process was extensively documented in Peter Norton’s book “Fighting Traffic.”

Holland faced the same crisis in the 1970s — after feminism, environmentalism, historic preservation, and the bike boom had emerged — and arrived at a radically different and much safer solution for both humans and our planet. London Cyclist magazine has the full story on how “Stop de Kindermoord” (yes, the unsubtle “Stop Killing Kids”) catalyzed these movements and created one of the world’s safest road cultures.

If you’re now inspired to rearrange the streets that you traverse — add some trees, a turning lane, a cycle track, wider sidewalks — you can go ahead and easily try out a new street section at StreetMix. (Hint: you can easily measure street widths using the ruler in Google Earth.)

(H/t to Eli at Seattle Neighborhood Greenways.)

War on cars continues: bike lane takes 0.2% of parking!

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L Street Protected Bike Lane Ribbon Cutting

Per Downtown DC BID, “In 2006 the Washington Parking Association (WPA) estimated that there were 199 parking garage locations in the Downtown and Golden Triangle BID areas providing 45,721 spaces.” That does not include the 17,000 street parking spaces that even AAA acknowledges still exist. Therefore, the 150 parking spaces removed to build the “controversial” L Street bike lane pictured above = 0.2% of downtown parking supply. In other words, 417 out of every 418 downtown parking spaces remain even after AAA whines that “The bike lanes have taken up all the parking spaces.” [posted to TheWashCycle]

Also, calendar note: the JITI Urban Transportation Seminar on February 6 will feature speakers from Tokyo Metro and Tokyu Corporation. Tokyu is notable for being one of the more profitable commuter rail + real estate + retail conglomerates in metro Tokyo.

Interrupted

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CMD East Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

The building in the middle of this ensemble — directly below the street sign — burned in a recent fire and is now being demolished. It was built a century ago as part of the Central Manufacturing District, and provided part of the original industrial park’s regal face to the city along Ashland Avenue. (The CMD’s front door was its better-known, mile-long streetwall along Pershing Avenue.) Together, they defined two of the few well-defined streetscapes on Chicago’s south side.