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along one or both sides of the street have to be destroyed and a new building line established -- it may be on the very line where most of the original buildings stood before increasing traffic began to offer inducements to move them forward to the sidewalk. Indeed, it may be said as a general rule that on any street where the buildings are set back from the sidewalk line the very advancement of a few buildings to the sidewalk line is a sign which points directly to the growth of travel and indicates that ample width will soon be needed in that thoroughfare.

As soon as these conditions appear, it is time to act. As already noted, it is not, in most cases, the desire to utilize a greater depth of lot which leads to the change, but the desire to get next to the sidewalk and to do away with a front yard which has served its purpose and is not wanted under the new conditions. If the street is one likely to have a considerable amount of through travel, it would be reasonable at once to lay it out wide enough to handle such travel; and the cost of the land taken for the widening would be charged, at least in part, to the abutters, for they get, by the change, what many of them already want and what the rest will soon be wanting -- direct frontage on a busy sidewalk.

A still wiser course of procedure would be to determine on the widening of these future main thoroughfares before any buildings have been advanced to the sidewalk line, and to establish building lines far enough apart to leave room for all probable future requirements; but to make no physical widening of the street until the growth of travel -- or the demands of the abutters -- call for shifting the sidewalks over to the established building line and enlarging the roadway to correspond. This is the invariable practice in Washington and in most well-conducted European cities. It is the plan to some extent in New York, where just recently the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue have been moved back against the building line on the space formerly occupied by stoops, areaways, and dooryards. Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixteenth Street, in Washington, are both laid out 160 feet wide from building line to building line, although Pennsylvania avenue is an important business artery and Sixteenth Street is a residence street without heavy traffic and with no commercial business. On the former, the wide sidewalks are in immediate contact with the fronts of the buildings, as is proper for a business street, and

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Last modified on 22-Dec 1999
Design format: copyright 1997-1999 Bruce S. Cridlebaugh
Original document: Frederick Law Olmsted, 1910