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Location: Prince Georges County, MD (formerly Long Island, NY)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by eschaton
I will say that the commercial corridors along 7th and Franklin look nice from the street side. Nice consistent street wall in places, and a good mix of retail and apartment buildings. Still, too many of the commercial buildings are only one story, which takes away from the urban feel. And there is a sea of parking behind literally every commercial building. This coupled with the low-density of the residential areas, means it's not particularly walkable, except for people who live in the apartments located in the business district.
While I enjoy walking along 7th and Franklin Avenues, behind those walkable buildings are huge parking lots. They put them behind the buildings to give the perception of a built up downtown. Walkable? Yes. Urban? Hardly.
OP, what parts of Garden City do you consider to be urban?
While I enjoy walking along 7th and Franklin Avenues, behind those walkable buildings are huge parking lots. They put them behind the buildings to give the perception of a built up downtown. Walkable? Yes. Urban? Hardly.
OP, what parts of Garden City do you consider to be urban?
What I meant to say is that it is a more urban suburb than most other suburbs, largely due to the grid-like pattern of the houses and the lack of winding roads and open space that I think are pretty common for most suburbs. I think it resembles an urban area like Queens a lot more than a more rural suburb, like those in northern Westchester.
As you said, most of the typical affluent suburban amenities (TD Ameritrade, Schwab, Franklin Templeton, big box shopping, outlet shopping, chain stores) are recent additions.
I don't think I said that. What I said was that it was and is a wealthy suburb, it was a planned suburb designed to attract the wealthy. Obviously much of what you listed wouldn't have existed in the early 1900s.
Quote:
It looks like what it is, a railroad exurb that's been swallowed up and become a bit less of a total bedroom community. But it still has total segregation of zoning whereas most suburbs are more commingled with neighborhood shopping mixed in, and a country club for every 7,500 residents.
Perhaps, there are plenty of suburbs that less comingled, perhaps it's a regional thing, but I think you posted similar examples of the Sacramento area. Exurb in my mind is something (usually) lower density, closer to what the OP think is a typical suburb (northern Westchester, western New Jersey) and rather new. But there's no real definition of the term, but I've never heard Garden City described as one. Old inner suburb, though unusually low density for its kind of NYC suburbs. I'm not sure why he think those semi-rural burbs are typical. Don't think they're typical for the NYC suburb.
It does get Sunday bus service, and relatively frequent service. But the riders are in other nearby Long Island towns, maybe some middle-class ones. And poor Hempstead is right next door, which boasts a crime rate few parts of NYC can match.
A couple that's good friends with my parents lives in Garden City, they like it there. They said the local bar has an interesting mix of people, though once they heard an anti-semitic remark. Unusual for Long Island. It's a relatively WASP wealthy suburb, as opposed to a predominately Jewish one. Being wealthy and non-Jewish in Long Island = heavily Republican voting. Voted nearly 70% for Romney in the last election. Well off Jewish north shore towns (including what was referred to as "Little Egg" in the Great Gatsby) had a bit of a Democratic lean.
That's an odd standard. Driveways can be added by infill. Most old New England neighborhoods have driveways. Somerville has driveways, and is probably more urban than almost all Pittsburgh residential neighborhood.
I said widespread presence, not merely presence. Retrofitted driveways are of course an exception. That said, I find in urban areas retrofitted driveways seldom become universal features of houses.
Admittedly, this might be because of my experience in Pittsburgh. The oldest flat neighborhoods are rowhouses, and even on the hillsides where detached housing is the norm, they are often less than a car width apart. Add to this the widespread availability of rear alleys in many neighborhoods, and the crazy topography (if your yard goes up by a 25 degree angle, a front-facing driveway can be kinda hard to work in), and there is a general absence of driveways in neighborhoods built out before 1930 or so.
In contrast, in flatter areas, or in New England, where there tended to be a bit more space between houses even in the pre-automobile era, I can see how driveways could be retrofitted into virtually every plot.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pinuzzo
What I meant to say is that it is a more urban suburb than most other suburbs, largely due to the grid-like pattern of the houses and the lack of winding roads and open space that I think are pretty common for most suburbs. I think it resembles an urban area like Queens a lot more than a more rural suburb, like those in northern Westchester.
Grid does not equal urban. Huge sections of suburban LA are gridded, and on (what we would think of as) tiny lots, but they're still single-story ranches. The movement to windy streets didn't really become universal in urban planning until the postwar period anyway, although it was initially proposed by FHA for new developments in the 1930s.
"a region or settlement that lies outside a city and usually beyond its suburbs and that often is inhabited chiefly by well-to-do families"
check, check, check. At the time it was built, there was very little out there (beyond the suburbs), chiefly inhabited by the well-to-do. Exurb. Now it's an exurb without the location since the suburbs have grown completely around it. Kind of the best of both worlds, as long as you can keep the riff raff from Hempstead out. As it's grown, it's shed some of the common exurban characteristics and gained some retail shopping and office rather than being more of a strict bedroom community. Eg, it's become more suburban and less exurban.
As far as compared to Sacramento? Well, our exurbs are much, much newer. Pretty much everything in California is. EDH or Granite Bay have lots of undeveloped land and they aren't built around trains which lets you use larger lots that are more spread out. It would sit somewhere between EDH and Granite Bay (completely NOT urban) and Davis. Davis is way more urban than Garden City. Higher density. Real downtown (albeit small). Landuse as I mentioned is much more commingled in Davis. I'd never call Davis urban. It just isn't.
San Mateo is kind of sort of but really not urban. Twice the density, "big city" downtown by comparison, way, way more employment. It actually has a higher daytime population. Irvine, CA (an exurb grown into a suburb) is arguably more urban. Density is lower, but Irvine is no where near built up and has a large airbase sitting in the middle of it. If you looked at the actual developed part and excluded the airbase, Irvine is probably more dense. Way more employment compared to population in Irvine. There's no way Irvine is urban.
I disagree with the WASP part. It's definitely White, however, not very many people trace there ancestry to England or Germany, and not very many people are protestant. A lot of the people here are either Italian, Irish, or Polish and Catholic.
Garden City is suburban. It's an affluent suburban town where most residents leave to work elsewhere and feeds off greater NYC. I would not call Garden City "urban" but it can be described as an older inner ring suburb, albeit a very nice one, and comparable to places like Bronxville or Scarsdale or Larchmont in Westchester, which are all handsome older inner ring suburbs.
I believe the terminology for Garden City may once have been "railroad suburb," where residents commuted to Manhattan by rail for work, returning in the evenings. The typical railroad suburb around New York City (and elsewhere) had a train station, a few small blocks of commercial retail, and residential neighborhoods.
Franklin Lakes is can probably be called "exurban" as it's on the fringes of the metropolitan area and once you go beyond Franklin Lakes you enter the "country."
Garden City is near NYC which is one of the most populated and densest cities in the USA. Not surprisingly many suburban areas around New York are also denser then normal.
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