PicoBlog

When I moved to Troy, NY, some of my favorite features of my new city were the alleys – all 43 miles of them. Troy’s alleys can be found almost everywhere within the city. Downtown Troy has the largest concentration, but alleys can also be found going north into North Central and between many streets in Lansingburgh and south into South Troy. Many of these alleys have street names, so if you were a stranger to Troy and looked at the Google map of the city, you might not realize how many alleys we actually have.

Alleys hold a fascination for many, in part due to popular entertainment. How many alleys have we seen portrayed in cities across America and the cities of the world where alleys are a vital part of the plot, usually for some kind of nefarious deed? Jack the Ripper roamed the streets and alleys of London. Street gangs fight for turf in alleys in New York and Hong Kong, while film noir hoodlums in fedoras slink through dark alleys with fire escapes and garbage cans in Chicago.

You know any character in a movie or television show that takes a shortcut through a dark alley is toast. There, ordinary people have been left broken so they can be reborn as superheroes or solidify their determination to be as evil as those who left them there. Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed in an alley. There would be no Batman without that alley. Alleys are a vital part of our modern entertainment culture. We know about alleys, even if where we live doesn’t have any.

So why do some cities have a network of alleys and others have hardly any? Philadelphia is known for its alleys, Chicago has 1,900 miles of them. Manhattan, in comparison, has hardly any. The presence of alleys has everything to do with how a city was laid out and when.

The word “alley” comes from Old French and the verb “aller,” which means “to go.” As people gathered in larger and larger urban spaces, alleys were laid out as both pedestrian pathways, often very narrow, and as service roads and back lanes. Many European cities, as well as a few North American cities also have narrow passageways that are long pedestrian staircases leading up and down steep city streets. In our popular entertainment, these alleys are always part of any good chase scene, with motorcycles and cars bouncing down the stairs with great regularity. 

Many older European and Middle Eastern cities have alleys that are much narrower than the ones we have here in North America and can be centuries old. Here in North America, alleys were laid out in our oldest cities primarily as service roads running behind commercial or residential streets. The center of Philadelphia has alleys that are famous tourist attractions, like Elfreth’s Alley, a beautiful brick and cobblestone paved residential alley dating back to 1703. It’s the country’s oldest continuously inhabited street. This, like several other Philadelphia alleys, has red brick Georgian-style houses facing each other along the alley, making it a charming residential enclave. The city also has more mundane alleys behind commercial and residential blocks that are purely service roads. 

The oldest parts of Charleston, SC have some lovely alleys, as well, some of which are better described as narrow pedestrian ‘lanes” which run behind residential buildings. These are some of the city’s most popular tourist attractions, with cobblestone pathways, flowering bushes and trees spilling over garden gates and walls.

New York, specifically Manhattan, doesn't have very many alleys. The city has a couple of mews blocks here and there which are lined with carriage houses, like Greenwich Village’s Washington Mews, a row of carriage houses now gated against traffic or parking.

In 1891, a developer named David H. King, Jr. envisioned an exclusive rowhouse enclave in Harlem, which was still an upscale white neighborhood. He built his houses on W. 138th and 139th streets, back to back, with  private alleys between the houses on both blocks. Since the rest of the avenues were already built up, the entrance to the alleys was midblock. They were gated private streets, inaccessible to the general public, reserved for servants, deliveries and sanitation. He called the houses the King Model Houses. He commissioned some of the era’s finest architects, including the prestigious firm of McKim, Mead & White.

Unfortunately for King, his project was a bust, and his backers, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. forced him into foreclosure in 1895, during one of the many financial panics of the day. The company mothballed the houses for almost 20 years and wouldn’t sell the houses to African Americans until the 1920s, during the Harlem Renaissance when they became home to leaders in the community and upwardly mobile black people, giving the complex the name, “Striver’s Row.” The alleys remain private to this day and now provide precious private parking for their owners.

The most famous alley in Manhattan is Cortlandt Alley, which runs for three blocks in Tribeca, between Canal and Franklin streets. It was laid out in 1817. Cortlandt Alley has become the embodiment of all urban alleys - the buildings that face it on both sides are primarily former warehouses and commercial businesses, with loading docks and fire escapes. The block between Walter and White streets is the one used most often for movies and tv shows. It’s moodily dark, with skeletons of fire escapes on both sides and lots of large graffiti on the brick walls. I suspect much of that graffiti was made to order for tv or movies, as it’s nowhere else but there.

Law & Order, NYPD Blue, Men in Black, Boardwalk Empire and more had scenes shot here. It’s been used for location shots so many times, most people outside of NYC think that the entire city looks like this. It doesn’t. When the city street grid was laid out in 1811, the planners wanted to get the maximum number of plots in Manhattan. They left no room for alleys. The true alleys that remain are in the oldest part of the city - below Canal Street. The rest of the island is alley-free, with only a couple of exceptions. That’s NYC for you, always thinking about maximizing return, not necessarily concerned with effective city planning practices. 

Can you imagine what NYC would look like had they planned alleys? UPS and other deliveries and shipping trucks would be off the main streets, especially in commercial areas. Garbage would be out of sight and collected behind the buildings. Residential streets could have garages if lots were deep enough. There would be much less traffic congestion, and the frequent use of the alleys would greatly improve many aspects of Manhattan life..

Brooklyn was a little different. Brooklyn Heights has its mews - Grace Court Alley, Love Lane, Verandah Place and Hunts Lane. They represent the very few remaining carriage house mews in Brooklyn, rows with carriage houses on both sides of the street, Veranda Place lost one side when Cobble Hill Park was established. There are a few more former carriage houses here and there, especially in Clinton Hill, but they appear on residential streets.

When it comes to an actual alley, they are fast disappearing. Red Hook Alley runs along a Native American trail, cutting across the street grid in downtown Brooklyn. Loading docks for the Board of Education building still open onto it. But for all intents and purposes, the alley is just about gone, as a large apartment building now faces it. Nearby Gallatin Place is really an alley, one block connecting Fulton and Livingston streets. Back in the late 19th century, the large department stores once on both sides used it for their loading docks. Today, it’s just a shortcut between the two streets.

There are, of course, several more such as this, but the big alley news in the brownstone neighborhoods of Brooklyn takes place in neighborhoods that weren’t developed until the early 20th century. The neighborhood of Crown Heights South, between Eastern Parkway and Empire Blvd has alleys galore along the lengths of several streets. They were a planned amenity with lots parceled out to accommodate these service roads and the garages that flanked them. The growing popularity of automobiles had a lot to do with this.

It all started with a one block development of upscale single-family brick homes nicknamed “Spotless Town.” The houses were built by a single developer between 1902 and 1904, and were designed by Henry M. Congdon, a well-respected architect who also worked on the original Metropolitan Opera and the Museum of Natural History. He placed 18 semi-detached houses on both sides of the block of Union Street between Brooklyn and Kingston avenues, and planned service alleys behind the southern side of the block, between Union and President streets. These, of course, were the most desirable houses in the group.

This was the first block and first development to feature service alleys. The developers who followed immediately copied the idea, and soon most of the blocks between New York and Schenectady avenues, and Eastern Parkway and Empire Blvd have alleys running behind the houses. A good idea is worth stealing and no doubt, these homes sold rapidly. The garages built for them were not the fancy carriage houses of the 19th century. These were small one-story, utilitarian brick buildings which now all have roll up doors.

Within the blocks that make up Crown Heights South, there are blocks of semi-detached row houses that don’t have alleys, but they have driveways between the pairs of buildings leading to a garage on either side of the driveway. These aren’t alleys but reinforce the demand for safe parking for people’s precious automobiles. Today, in a Brooklyn that has more cars than parking spaces, having your own garage or parking space makes the houses that have them more valuable than those that don’t, sometimes just across the street. I wonder if the developers of long ago realized how important that would be.

Finally, let’s get back to Troy, the city that started this discussion. Troy’s alleys are great. The downtown alleys were laid out initially to house the two story carriage houses of the wealthy people in the equally wealthy city of Troy. Some also provide service alleys for the downtown businesses. I first regarded these alleys and the carriage houses with a NYC mindset – I was sure that most had been turned into residences or artist’s studios. In Brooklyn, people spend millions of dollars to live in the renovated carriage houses of Brooklyn Heights and Clinton Hill. But driving around, I realized that that hadn’t really happened in Troy. Most of the carriage houses were either garages/storage spaces or locked up and empty. Only a rare few were inhabited.

In writing this story, I drove through downtown Troy’s alleys just to check. Sadly, more than half the carriage houses are gone, and are now just off street parking spots or extended back yards. Even behind some of the swankiest homes. The remaining structures are either one or two story brick buildings, as old as the houses they are behind, and most are garage spaces with new metal roll-up garage doors. If they do have second or third floors, most are boarded up, bricked in or sealed with iron doors. Not many are inhabited.

Lansingburgh has as many alleys as downtown, but interestingly, they aren’t named. They are, with a few exceptions, lined with one story garages, built of both wood and brick. A couple could even be called barns. There’s one carriage house that is very cool, pictured below. They are not inhabited, and some are hidden behind overgrown vines and vegetation and haven’t been used in decades. There are vast stretches of alleys that have no structures and simply face backyards. The same can be said for South Troy, where there are few structures along the alleys, which are used primarily as parking pads or fenced-in rear yard space.

My house has an alley running behind it. No one on our block has a garage or carriage house, but a look at old maps show that many of them once did, including our house. We put our garbage cans out in the alley. The short walk to the back gate and the alley is only inconvenient in the winter, and spares us having large, ugly garbage bins cluttering up the front of our house. We’ve used the alley entrance for delivery or removal of stuff, which came in really handy when we first moved in. You have to drive very carefully there, as the road hasn’t been paved since World War II (I was going to say the Civil War, but that’s an exaggeration, right?) and is riddled with deep potholes. Still, I’m very glad it’s there.

A couple of years ago, Troy rediscovered their alleys, and in the parlance of city planning, they worked on ways to “activate the alleys.” Several organizations were established and existing organizations like TAP (Troy Architectural Program) and the Arts Center of the Capital Region embraced the idea that alleys needed to be kept up, buildings repaired and life brought back to them. Alleys are a great place for public art, for events with street vendors, performances and the like, and should be avenues that people use, just to get around. Alleys with carriage houses could be brought back to life with residents.

With that in mind, a group called Troy Alley Action was formed to encourage the city’s young people to participate in creating art for Franklin Alley, downtown’s most prominent alley, which opens onto River Street, one of Troy’s busiest retail streets. The new Franklin Alley Pedestrian Path debuted in 2020, funded by the Arts Center, the city and local businesses and property owners. The alley was repaved, the large commercial trash containers were removed, lights were strung along the path, and murals painted. In the summer, café tables and chairs and special events made the alley a destination.

Franklin Alley is great. There are several other downtown alleys that could also be “activated,” and neighborhood alleys could get more positive attention. Alleys are part of what makes Troy such a great city. Who would guess that the back-of-the-house pathway once reserved for coachmen, and garbage trucks could actually be one of the city’s coolest features?

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