Lest the bummer events of the last few weeks have dimmed your memory, we had a big snowstorm last month! And although it caused temporary inconvenience (or worse) for some, it also gave Seattleites a chance to wander through streets uncrowded by traffic. In this week’s web-only edition, Eli Sanders offers his take on Seattle’s temporary culture of street joy—and what might be done to make it permanent.
It’s messy, of course, this business of joy-ing in the street. During the snow, there were occasionally heated confrontations between sledders and drivers. And after the melt, things were literally messy on many of the party boulevards. On East Denny Way, for example, cardboard, mattresses, and other sledding materials were left on the side of the road for others to clean up.
Still, why not build on the better parts of this good thing and expand the city’s street-closure program? We don’t need to wait for snow to shut streets down, nor do we need to wait for summer.
Right now, Seattle’s sanctioned street closures are confined to daytime hours during two months—August and September—and mostly to streets that are near public parks or beachfront. But other cities, including New York, have temporarily closed non-parkside streets to cars in experiments that Seattle claims to be emulating. So why not do the same here? And why not in months other than the two warmest months of the year? After all, there are good occasions for street revelry all year round, and a large number of streets in the city that are good candidates for temporary reappropriation.
Read the whole thing here.