140 COMMISSION ON" BUILDING DISTRICTS 



Stores on residential streets undesirable 



As I have already pointed out the greatest danger from traffic is where 

 there is a mixed traffic — commercial and pleasure traffic — moving together 

 along the same limited roadway at different speeds and constantly stopping. 



I think that it is obvious to anyone that where there are stores in tene- 

 ment quarters, stores with four or five or six stories of apartments above 

 them, the streets hecome dangerous for children to play in. 



Land subdivision and districting 



It would be a more desirable condition if the ordinary house could be 

 put on a lot more nearly square, so that it would have light on all sides. 

 1 would like to give you an illustration showing an alternative method of 

 subdivision of an indentical area in the Borough of Brooklyn. A triangular 

 tract of twenty-odd acres, bounded on all three sides by wide streets, is now 

 subdivided in the conventional fashion by streets sixty and eighty feet wide, 

 and has been evidently designed for detached houses on plots containing 

 two units, that is, plots forty feet wide by one hundred feet in depth. The 

 alternative subdivision is for streets forty and fifty feet in width, with lots 

 sixty feet in depth and fifty feet wide. A little neighborhood park is set 

 aside for the use of the residents and there is a larger number of the fifty 

 by sixty foot plots. The result is to decrease the cost of each plot, not- 

 withstanding the greater expenditure for sewers, by reason of the greater 

 length of streets, the greater expenditure for curbing, and for sidewalks, 

 but a much reduced cost of pavement, owing to narrower roadways, the 

 result being that the plots themselves, with all improvements, cost appre- 

 ciably less than in the case of the forty by one hundred foot units. 



At the last annual convention of the National City Planning Conference 

 the general feeling was that under existing conditions the best typical lot 

 unit was twenty-five by one hundred feet, because allowance had to be 

 made for convertibility at any time to business or industrial use. Lots 

 fifty by sixty feet are not as readily convertible to business or industry as 

 lots twenty-five by one hundred. This, in my judgment, proves the necessity 

 for districting the city in order to obtain an ideal street and block layout for 

 residential use. 



This city has suffered tremendous loses by the inflexibility of its street 

 system which, instead of controlling a subdivision, has been controlled by 

 the habit of creating lots one hundred feet deep, lying between streets two 

 hundred feet apart, and great enterprises, a number of which were formerly 

 located at the Erie Basin section of Brooklyn, finding themselves hemmed 

 in by rigid street systems, to which more or less sanctity was attributed, 

 have been obliged to find new sites on the New Jersey meadows. One 

 conspicuous instance of this is the Worthington rumps Works. The city 

 lias suffered materially by compelling a large number of factories to go into 

 Other States in order to secure adequate sites. 



Height limit should be more drastic 



I cannot speak for those whose chief interest is the value of real estate. 

 but I believe that the man who wants to maintain a house in a certain dis- 

 trict would welcome the one times street width limitation and feel that the 

 ordinary street width, which we will call sixty feet and in some cases eighty 

 feet, would permit as tall a building as he wants to see in his neighborhood, 

 and in a great many cases — I am speaking now of my own personal prefer- 

 ence — he would like to see a height limit of the street width less fifteen or 

 twenty per cent. In other words, I believe there are many people who will 



