It's porch time.
I've seen a lot more people out on their porches or balconies during the last few weeks. On Saturday I walked west through Logan Square and then up Fullerton to near the city line to take photos of neighborly building design and street use. There were lots of people out on their porches or in their front yards in Logan Square; I of course said hi to everyone and got lots of smiles and waves back.
The houses that didn't have people on the porch often featured chairs or benches that suggested that people had been sitting outside at some other point. This evidence of life in the front of the building is neighborly building design. Transparent doors, flowers and plants, chairs and benches and, most of all, people turn a structure into a welcoming place on the block.
Logan Square has a reputation as being a neighborly neighborhood in Chicago, and Albany Street in particular. So I took some photos of various parts of Albany to see if the building design matched the reputation. Interestingly, I found that the street had an unusually low number of buildings with fences in front of them. A fence, particularly if it's high and imposing, says "keep out." A neighborly building says hi (and is equipped with more effective security measures if they're needed).
This whole stretch of buildings didn't have fences. It seemed that going fence-less was infectious; houses without fences usually had other fence-less buildings around it. Buildings with obnoxious keep out fences usually had lots of buildings with imposing fences around them. It defines the character of the block.
Neighborly design elements: Small fence confined to just the yard, bike locked in front, flowers, transparent door, bench on porch.There's a growing pool of "neighborly building design" photos in the Neighbors Project flickr pool. Check them out, and add your photos of good examples of neighborly building design on your block.
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