Life beyond Streets

Remembering When Our Streets Belonged to Everyone Just a few generations ago, streets were places of commerce and play, places to socialize, places where public life happened. The author of the Chicago-based Get Around Blog just finished reading Peter Norton’s book, Fighting Traffic, which outlines in fascinating-yet-depressing detail how the rise of the automobile rudely interrupted this whole way of life. Children playing in the streets in New York City circa 1900. We are not going to delve too deeply into history except to offer this quote from a judge, shortly after cars came on the scene: “It won’t be long before children won’t have any rights at all in the streets.” The Get Around Blog takes the opportunity to show just how far we’ve traveled from the notion of the streets as a public space: In the century since the automobile first muscled its way to the top of society’s transportation food chain, we have legislated other modes of transportation into a thin sliver of grudgingly ...