image via Nextcity.

Do Taller Buildings Have to Mean Darker Streets?

Nobody, it seems, likes Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue. It’s a big, busy street — parking on both sides, two lanes of traffic (plus turning lanes). The older buildings are industrial and stick low to the ground. But those don’t get mentioned much. It’s the newer ones that stick out: They rise up tall and glassy, fronts flat to the sidewalk. Their ground floors, mostly spent on required parking, turn cold, concrete faces to people walking by.

They’re nothing like the squatter, more pleasant buildings directly to the east, that fill the blocks of Park Slope, from this edge of the neighborhood, up to Prospect Park. On the contrary, Fourth Avenue’s modern wretches are exactly the sort of buildings that neighborhoods like Park Slope fear when developers and policymakers start talking about building more housing......Continue Reading

> via nextcity.org