601 Holloway

The view of 601 Holloway, above, shows a bit of the east side of Elizabeth St. behind it. Moving into the 600 block of Holloway, the houses become somewhat smaller or simpler in style - a reflection of the human distribution in the pre-car era; if you could, you paid to be closer to downtown.

In the early 1970s, this house and the houses behind it were demolished in order to widen Elizabeth St. into a 5-lane wide arterial.

Site of 601 Holloway, 2007.

While this narrows one block to the north of Holloway back to a 2 lane roadway, undoubtedly plans were once in place (and perhaps they are still lurking somewhere) to widen this to the north.

This is the kind of mistake we would hope to avoid with Alston Avenue. I hope that streets like Alston can remain human-scale, and streets like Elizabeth, Dillard, and Roxboro can be narrowed back to a manageable size someday. I've posted on this issue before, and Kevin was kind enough to mention the effect of Elizabeth on Cleveland-Holloway on his site yesterday.

Kudos, once again, to Mark Ahrendsen of the City Transportation Dept. for pushing forward to improve Elizabeth without much of a budget - by reducing the travel lanes to two and creating on-street parking/bike lanes to effectively 'narrow' the street between Holloway and E. Main. While it still feels like a wasteland when walking this street, re-painting these lines has improved the feel of the roadway considerably.