PART II: Main Thoroughfares
Pittsburgh: Main Thoroughfares and The Down Town District
Frederick Law Olmsted report to The Pittsburgh Civic Commission, 1910
page 37
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ultimately to convert it into an ample urban thoroughfare with the minimum of cost and inconvenience.
Whatever radical changes may be made to improve Old Streets the present or safeguard the future condition of the thoroughfare system in regions that are now rural, there remains a huge problem within the district where the street system has already crystallized into substantially its final form. Here increased capacity can, for the most part, be secured only by local improvements and widenings of existing thoroughfares.
Fortunately, the building up of the street frontage with solid blocks of stores, apartments, and business structures, has at most points followed rather slowly after the earlier wave of detached dwelling houses, and a large proportion of the streets which are destined to be the main arteries of the huge future city are still lined by buildings which are set back at various distances from the street, leaving front door-yards between them and the sidewalk. Outside of the down town district, and a limited area in East Liberty, it is possible, therefore, to provide for the ultimate widening of these streets without the destruction of many valuable structures, provided the preliminary steps are promptly taken.
As traffic increases and the lots come to be used for business purposes, such a set-back becomes inconvenient and undesirable, and one by one the buildings are either extended to the sidewalk by new additions, or new buildings are erected on the sidewalk line. The reason for this change is not usually that additional lot depth is required, for often considerable yards are left unoccupied at the rear, but is simply that on a commercial street the buildings need to be as close to the stream of traffic as possible; and since the individual lot owner cannot move the street as a whole up to his building, he has to extend or move his building to the street. His immediate purpose is thus served, and ultimately the whole row of buildings is similarly advanced in response to changed conditions. But at just about the time when this process is fully completed, the volume of traffic flowing over the street is apt to have become so great that everybody recognizes the street to be too narrow for the increased traffic it has now to carry. If the case is a bad one, the inconvenience due to overcrowding the traveled way will in time reach a point where, in spite of the great cost of such an operation, the buildings all
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