Cities and towns, close your streets
For those keeping track at home, Santa prefers the Waterbury line.
He arrived earlier this month alongside other Bridgeport-toWaterbury passengers at the Seymour train station for an annual event that draws visitors to the town’s miniature downtown, but his appearance appeals to more than just the 10-and-under crowd. Seymour annually closes the local stretch of Bank Street for the nighttime event, which is only a few blocks long, and lets visitors enjoy the array of unique businesses in the neighborhood and shop from local merchants without fear of kids running into traffic.
It’s the kind of thing we could use a little more of.
Connecticut is heavy on suburban development, and highways and strip malls aren’t ideal for bringing people together. But we also have many downtowns, most of which fell on hard times and a few that have experienced a revival in recent years.
Taking the opportunity to close streets to vehicular traffic for set periods — or permanently — can be a way to rebuild interest in those areas. It works best when there’s already an established local shopping scene, and COVID showed again that there’s interest in pedestrian-centered public spaces. As we endure another pandemic winter, we should take advantage of what works to safely draw people out of their homes.
It’s not as though this hasn’t been tried before. There’s a long history of cities turning key streets into pedestrian malls, sometimes successfully but often not. Always there’s potential backlash with at least some merchants fearing a loss of business. The key to determining whether it will work seems to be how much the area resembles an actual city street, minus the cars. If it’s a simulacrum of an enclosed shopping mall, as attempts to pedestrianize in earlier decades often turned into, no one is going to like it.
Earlier attempts at pedestrian malls in center cities were often a reaction to the general decline in American downtowns, driven by suburbanization and car-centric development. To counter the trends that saw shoppers abandoning traditional downtowns en masse in favor of climate-controlled shopping centers in the middle of nowhere, planners tried to create something similar on existing city streets in the hopes of luring people back.
It didn’t work for the simple reason that if someone wants a mall, they’re going to find a mall. If they want a city-like experience, that’s something else altogether. And if they can get that experience without fearing for their or their kids’ lives based on traffic, all the better.
In Seymour, the First Saturday event features seasonal attractions and extended hours for local businesses to attract shoppers who come in for the Santa visit and tree lighting. It’s only one night a year (and if you missed it, put it on the calendar for 2022) but it’s a great example of a town showing off its local shopping in a very un-malllike setting. Seymour is a small town, but is blessed with a real downtown, something it shares with many other communities in the area. There’s no reason its event couldn’t be replicated all over the place.
There are ready options all around. Greenwich and Stamford have downtown streets with enough pedestrians already to support a no-cars plan. The Shops at Yale, where multiple streets converge in New Haven, could work as a walkers-only zone, and really anything that would change the dynamic on Whalley Avenue, one of the worst roads in the state, should at least be attempted. And as Seymour shows, even smaller towns have potential.
Such plans can draw criticism on the theory that if people can’t drive directly by a store, they’ll never shop there. Experience, though, has shown that’s not the case, and traditional shopping malls are one example of why that theory makes no sense. Shoppers are rarely able to park directly in front of the place they want to shop, anyway, so adding a little walking is not going to be a deterrent.
It could, though, be an attraction. Close off the cars and give the streets back to the people. At least for a little while, if only in some places.
Downtowns have come back in style, but could still use a boost. Give them to the people and see what happens.