The Crescent Strategy In Residential Planning

This is somewhat of a local issue. In the posting on this blog titled "The City Of Five Towns", we saw how the city landscape of Niagara Falls, Canada can still clearly be seen as five towns that have merged together. Many cities have arisen from the merger of towns in close proximity, but in few places do the divisions remain so apparent.

Today, I would like to discuss another interesting feature of the landscape in this city. Like many cities in North America, the Canadian city of Niagara Falls underwent expansion as the postwar Baby Boom arrived along with the prosperity which brought widespread automobile ownership. The trouble here was that there were several pre-existing barriers to new residential neighbourhoods (neighborhoods) that were to spread outward from the original city.

Niagara Falls is where hydroelectricity is generated. Water for electric generation is brought from the Welland River, to the south of Niagara Falls, and crosses the city by way of an open canal to the power generating plants to the north of the city. This hydraulic canal was built before the postwar expansion of the city, without regard that it would cause future subdivisions to forced into tracts of available land that were not rectangular in shape.

There is also the paths across the city of high-voltage electrical lines from the generating plants, under which homes could not be built. There was the major highway, the Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW), passing through the land on which new subdivisions would be built. There were also rail lines in the area. Finally, Portage Road was built in a logical place for a road, along the cusp of the glacial impact crater that I would someday identify and write about on the Niagara natural history blog. But this left Portage Road as a curve, and not as a straight line.

The result is that the city of Niagara Falls, Canada, along with neighbouring cities Welland and St. Catharines, turned into a case study of urban planning with regard to pre-existing barriers. Blocks of homes along streets are rectangular in shape, and such rectangles fit neatly together to form new sections of the city. But here, due to the pre-existing barriers, tracts of land which would be the logical place to build new residential sub-divisions were not rectangular in shape and this made necessary some creative solutions that I think are worth explaining here.

Here is a map link: www.maps.google.com .

The city had already encountered the geometric challenge of building in non-rectangular spaces during the merger of the five towns which would make up the Canadian Niagara Falls. In the section of the city nearest the falls, around the intersection of Victoria Avenue and Centre Street, you can see that the grid pattern of the city blocks are set at an angle of about 45 degrees to that of the rest of the city. Not far away, there is Epworth Circle, and associated outer crescents, which were constructed to make use of a triangular space between a rail line and a main road. This would provide valuable experience for the postwar expansion.

The solution that came to be is what I refer to as the "Crescent Strategy" because of the numerous short residential streets, ending in a loop, which would be built into the city. These crescents are usually not actually in the form of crescents in the geometric sense, but can be called as such due to the loop at the end. The crescents of Niagara Falls are short streets of usually 8-12 homes. These are not gated communities but there is no through traffic, making them safer for young children.

The crescents are sometimes called courts, and are virtually always called courts in Welland and St. Catharines. They are also sometimes called places. This seems to have been a local idea since there are nearly no such crescents or courts in Hamilton.

This design of a short street of nice, new homes ending in a loop was effective in fitting homes into tracts of land which were not rectangular in shape due to pre-existing barriers. They seem to have become a style in themselves and found their way into areas in the Niagara Region where the conventional rectangular blocks could have been built. These crescents or courts are seen only in newer areas, not in the older parts of the cities. The squares in the older sections were themselves once farmsteads, as we saw in "Farms Of Long Ago", on the world and economics blog.

These crescents, or courts, were not the only strategy used to fit new housing developments into spaces which were other than rectangular in shape. An ideal place for some new homes was in Niagara Falls between Morrison Street and the electric power lines to the south. The problem was that the available land was triangular in shape, rather than rectangular.

But with some slick geometry, Alexander Crescent and Inglis Drive appeared with new homes. The excess space was taken up by a small park and an island where the two streets meet. No one said that a park had to be rectangular in shape. Alexander Crescent is not one of the crescents to which I am referring here because it has access at both ends, and does not end in a loop.

Not far away, is a space solution which I have not seen anywhere else. Planners managed to design streets which would leave yards as fairly close to rectangular. Except in the very center of the new development, where there would be quite a bit of space left over. The solution was Shirley Park, located so that it took up excess space behind backyards and was accessible from the street by a corridor between houses.

Also not far away was Rosedale Drive. It was a one-block residential street, but when the stream known as Muddy Run (although I read an account that it's water was actually crystal clear) was diverted underground and the Valley Way neighbourhood was built, the possibility arose of extending Rosedale Drive. The trouble here wasn't shape, it would form a neat rectangle for a city block, it was space. There was too much space for just one new street between Jepson and McRae Streets, but not enough space for two.

The solution was to build an island on Rosedale Drive. When I lived nearby as a young boy, I thought it's purpose was decorative. Now I can see in the satellite imagery that it was simply to take up space.

There seems to be practically no such creative geometry that was necessary on the U.S. side of Niagara Falls, although other-than-rectangular streets became necessary in the area of Laughlin Park.