Since the 1990’s, a variety of towns and cities around the United States have decided to undertake revitalization projects. These projects range greatly in scale, from the single-alley retrofits like Buckham Alley in Flint, Michigan, to the alley master plans of San Francisco, California. While this difference in scale is notable, far more relevant to us in the International District are the revitalization strategies, methods of community involvement, funding processes, and most importantly, their purpose. 

Alley Makeover Project – Baltimore, Maryland

The back alleys of Baltimore suffered an affliction many residents of the International District are well familiar with: trash. Due to dumping by residents and refuse left by unhoused neighbors, many of the back alleys in Charm City unfortunately lacked charm, with built up trash rendering the alleys unsafe, unusable, and pest ridden. Such a state of affairs was an massive burden for residents, who pushed for the municipal government to present some form of solution.

That solution came from an unexpected place: the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore, a coalition of local government, businesses, and community organizations dedicated to preserving the city’s namesake harbor. Due to rain runoff, trash abandoned in the alleyways would often be found floating or dredged from the harbor, and thus the Partnership determined that cleaning the terrestrial alleys would be vital to improve the water.

Thus, a $30,000 grant was used to coordinate neighbors for cleanup efforts, undertake cheap infrastructure improvements, and transform 20 alleyways across 6 distinct neighborhoods into community spaces, where the walls are adorned with murals and neighbors can host block parties.

This project, while interfacing with municipal government and using grant funding, heavily depended on community engagement for its success, not only in mobilizing volunteers for the project’s initial completion, but also in fundamentally changing the community’s relationship with the alleys. A similar change will be necessary for long term improvements to the alleys in the International District.

Five Points Alley – Cincinnati, Ohio

Located in the Walnut Hills neighborhood near downtown Cincinnati, Five Points Alley rests in the heart of a recovering disinvested neighborhood. Much of the area was revitalizing, with improved housing and flourishing local businesses, but the alley system had sadly not joined the rest of the neighborhood in this process, with much of the area uncared for, unlit, and unused. Due to this, the area became a public safety concern, a very familiar worry for many residents of the International District.

While in partnership with the city, efforts to improve the Five Points Alley were spearheaded by the Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation, a non-profit community development corporation founded in 1977, which prioritized mobilizing residents and local businesses to become personally involved in the upkeep and usage of the alley. This began with several modest pop-up events and community clean up events, but in 2015 the CDC also undertook the challenge of constructing improvements to the alley. These improvements sought to reconstruct the Five Point Alley into a gathering space, and notably used old pieces of the alley in creative ways which evoked the community that was involved, such as a small, older tree that had grown in the alley being used as a landscaping centerpiece, and pieces of granite and broken concrete being retrofitted into seating. This effort has been successful, with pop-up beer gardens and community events being a regular staple of the previously disused alley.

The vital lesson portrayed by this case is that, while alleys are often perceived as slow to adjust to the surrounding community and a significant public safety risk, they have impressive potential to become community third spaces, where people can comfortably enjoy their time.

Living Alleys Project – San Francisco, California

Unlike previously mentioned case studies, the Living Alleys Project of San Francisco has been a project that has spanned three decades and has been led by the city itself. Within the Octavia Market Plan area, a neighborhood in San Francisco, nearly 16% of the public right-of-way takes the form of alleyways, spaces that the city and community had long neglected both in their maintenance and usage, which the city saw as a prime opportunity to create a pedestrian environment that both eases traffic congestion in the neighborhood and provides a park-like space for residents. With these goals in mind, San Francisco created the Living Alleyways Project in 1990.

The core of this project is the strategy of using a publicly available toolbox for alley design and a series of public-private partnerships, organized through a newly established Community Challenge Grant. With these, neighbors and community organizations were encouraged to design their own living alleyways, which the city could provide technical support for, and then provide grants to partially fund the redevelopment. The most successful of these has been Linden Alley, where the city provided $189,000 in grant funding in January of 2017 which helped pay for improvements such as overhead lanterns, sidewalk gardens, and planter benches.

The key to San Francisco’s success was the involvement of the community in the design process, as well as a grant structure for public-private partnerships that enabled limited city funded to have an overstated positive impact on the neighborhood alleys.

East-West Alley – Roswell, Georgia

Roswell is a suburb of Atlanta, with a population of approximately 92,000 and a carefully preserved historical district. However, in 2014, the city council had come to a conclusion: the city’s commercial district, long since eclipsed by those around it, was struggling to survive. Thus, the council commissioned the town’s Community Development Department, under the direction of the Historical Preservation Committee, to redevelop their commercial district with a set of new alleyways, retrofitted from streets fronting many businesses.

Unlike the other case studies seen here, Roswell’s approach to alleyway redevelopment utilized a very traditional, unilateral method of development. In the summer of 2014, a public meeting was held, primarily involving local property and business owners, which determined the areas of focus and design priorities of the project via a survey. This information was compiled into a plan by 2015, which was then approved, and Phase 1 of redevelopment began in October of 2017, where the East Alley was rebuilt. This project did show success, not only improving pedestrian traffic for the businesses, but also providing a new space for public events. With this in hand, Phase 2 was approved for the West Alley, which began reconstruction in 2022. 

This project shows that traditional unilateral planning is possible in a project such as this, but is greatly limited by cost, time, and community involvement. While the alleys did produce the desired effects, only 90 members of the public were involved in the process, and the cost limited this form of redevelopment to only two, small areas, where individuals still need to drive to access. This form of redevelopment would likely prove difficult in the International District.

Coal/Aztec Alley – Gallup, New Mexico

To our West, Gallup is not a large city; with a population of approx. 22,000, it is significantly smaller than any other town on this list. However, aside from simply being our neighbor, it does have some striking similarities with the International District. The International district is only about a third larger than Gallup, with approx. 28,000 people, and just like the International District, Gallup is a relatively diverse town, with large communities of Indigenous (47.2%), Hispanic(31.7%), and White(16.8%) individuals. Gallup is a sister city of the International District, and to learn from their process can prove valuable.

Over the past several years, the City of Gallup has worked closely with the Gallup Main Street in an effort to build vitality in its downtown, including public art projects, coordinating local businesses to collaborate on downtown nights, and Coal Avenue Commons project, an effort to reconstruct and revitalize three blocks along Coal Av. into a vibrant plaza space. Phase II of this project involves the reconstruction of the Coal/Aztec Alley, which the Gallup MainStreet Arts and Cultural District received $600,000 of Capital Outlay funding for from the New Mexico MainStreet in 2022. This project included repaving, public art, improve pedestrian and bicyclist safety, and collaborating with companies to relocate phone lines and fiber from telephone lines to belowground. 

The value for us in this studying Gallup’s program is twofold. Firstly, their project for alleyway revitalization is closely linked to other related programs that incentivize further use of the alleys, including beautification, improvements to additional pedestrian infrastructure and spaces, and collaboration with local businesses to make the alleys a values and utilized area. Secondly, the utilization of the Mainstreet program as both a non-profit organizing strategy and a source of state funding enabled the small town to punch far above its weight in the scale of projects it could undertake.