Iowans were fooled by a prank to make a busy area of Des Moines... walkable

Ultragigagigantic , 3 months ago

If i can walk downtown to get to the blazing saddle for my weekly BJ from a stranger you can to!

jordanlund , 3 months ago

They did this in downtown Eugene, Oregon back on the early 70s. Blocked off a chunk of the downtown core, made it walkable, and turned it into a big outdoor mall.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Mall

It slowly failed and the last remnants of it were removed after 30 years.

One of the reasons it failed is they went back to charging for parking.

scrubbles OP , 3 months ago

One fault does not mean it's a bad idea. Also reading through it the largest issues I see it faced was that once people started enjoying it other people didn't like how they enjoyed it. Outdoor groups of people, gathering space, essentially using the public space in a public way, and other members of the public didn't like that, so going into it knowing what you want is key there.

However, like I said one failure 50 years ago does not mean we shelve the idea and never look back. We should look at successes and failures and determine what differences are.

fruitycoder , 3 months ago

Definitly seems like a good lesson in that some interesting urban planning alone won't fix every issue. A take that maybe more biased from my perspective, that an over emphasis on amenities over production (that ultimately pays for the amenities and the rest of peoples financially fufiled wants) is probably detrimental to both

andrewrgross , 3 months ago

That's sad to hear.

I went to De Moines for work once, and to their credit: the place has charm. It's got more going on than I expected.

Coming from the west coast, I'll totally own up to my preconceptions, but a bunch of the businesses and signs made it clear that De Moines has a far more open-minded, fun-loving modern culture than I was expecting.

Still, I can't say I'm surprised at this. Especially on Facebook. I don't think the people who run the hip microbreweries and rad clothing stores I saw are commenting on Historical Society Facebook posts.