How Food Became the Ferment of Urbanity

The arrival of a Starbucks, a brew-pub, a Trader Joe's grocery store or the installation of a farmers market all have been identified as metrics indicating that a neighborhood "has arrived". Add to this list beer gardens, sidewalk eating, food halls, food markets, food trucks and urban farms and one has a complete list of popular benchmarks for urban revitalization and gentrification; all have to do to with food and drink!

New Crepe vendor at the Mt Vernon MarketPlace in Baltimore
(photo ArchPlan)

If we experience our cities today no longer a smoggy foul stinking place in which residents toil day and night in factories, do laundry or cook meals for large families on wood burning stoves but as places where people frolic, attend festivals and hang out under sunbrellas or mobile heaters (depending on the season) imbibing or sort through elaborately stacked tiny food towers on large plates, it is because, yes, life has changed.

An ever growing number of people not only eat-out but also eat outside, in streets, in beer gardens and on rooftop patios. This trend has had a profound impact on the face of cities for some years now. Even duller places have taken on a tiny bit of the flair of the boulevards of Paris or the avenues of Barcelona. European urban flair can organically evolve as in Baltimore's historic Fells Point or it can be created out of whole cloth as in Bethesda Row in suburban Maryland or Santana Row in San Jose.

Santana Row, San Jose, Ca

Just when the kitchens in even modest houses began to feature professional grade stainless steel stoves, ovens and grills the residents have begun to eat outside the home more often. And we are not talking about grabbing a bite at the drive thru lane of a McBurger place but sitting down and consulting a three page menu complete with a three minute recital of today's special delivered with aplomb by an impeccable waiter who seems to be fluent in several languages including French, Italian and some Asian terms.

Bethesda Row, Bethesda, MD

The Guardian's Aditya Chakrabortty writing about London's exploding food scene can hardly suppress his sarcasm:

Eating out is fine, for diners and investors, but the gastronomy craze won’t produce a healthy economy....

...an image of the ideal postmodern city as a menagerie of apartment-dwelling “creative” freelancers who roam from start-up to eatery, clutching only a MacBook

In spite of a few scholarly investigations, most observations are serendipitous and speculative. Friends or family raving about the latest restaurant one absolutely has to try, the throngs of folks flocking into previously forgotten urban places where restaurants seem to grow like apples in fall, long lines to get a seat unless one uses the NoWait app on the smartphone, and print media where restaurant reviews exceed the length of the business section. Such are the observations that make us conclude that more and more sections of town seem to be devoted to partying.

Brew Pub in San Diego's Northpark

Its not just New York, San Francisco and Chicago anymore, high cuisine and celebration of food is flooding TV shows and the country alike.

In Baltimore the perennial and historic hang out for bar visitors, Fells Point, has long been joined by Cross Street in Federal Hill, O'Donnell Square in Canton and the Avenue in Hampden followed by even more peripheral places that are hiding in designed pseudo obscurity like WC Harlan in Remington thriving on not sitting in a lively cluster but requiring discovery by adventurers and the cognoscenti.

In Denver, for a long time not exactly famous for food, the original popular restaurant scene around Larimer Square (which is still updating) was followed by the soon to become mayor's brewpub near the then seedy Union Station area that has since been transformed itself into a food hub of sorts (some attribute it all to Hickenlooper's brew pub) so that the insiders began to flee downtown and venture into (now no longer) edge locations such as LoHi and RiNo, exemplified by the mortuary conversion Linger or the interior marketplace housed in a 1880's brick foundry The Source.

the Source food hall in Denver (photo ArchPlan)

San Diego, long known mostly for fish tacos, Little Italy gives the Gaslamp Quarter a run for the money but both have been given over to tourists. Hipness migrated from Hillcrest to Northpark to to Southpark to Golden Hill and lately to the East Village.

In Washington DC, where restaurants and nightlife were long mostly found in Georgetown and Adams Morgan, it is now hard to find any central district that isn't full of crowds in search of the ubiquitous eateries including the new development around the Verizon Center, and the Navy Yard and the not so edgy anymore U-Street.

The restaurants seem to come to the rescue of the concept of new "mixed use" infill and transit oriented development projects for which more and more urban design guidelines require active first floor usage. There isn't enough retail to cover all those floor-plates that are more dictated by the scale of the apartments above than the needs of retailers. Were it not for food, much of those spaces would remain vacant.

Restaurant bar on Larimer Square, Denver

Restaurants also draw people into redeveloped areas that would otherwise remain hard to find forgotten corners:

In Baltimore it is the local farm-to-table high-end cuisine of Woodberry Kitchen that makes the Clipper Mill redevelopment a well branded destination; the rustic Cafe Artefact and the Union brewpub that redirect people from Hampden's crowded Avenue into the Jones Falls valley, Parts and Labor and the Cafe Charmington opened people's eyes to the old Remington neighborhood. Joe Squared Pizza and Liam Flynn's were pioneers in Station North, an area where folks didn't dare to tread until recently; the brand-new Mt Vernon Market tries out the mini market hall concept hard at the edge of deserted sections of the former downtown retail district, the small indoor market being a concept that successfully stabilized Baltimore's Belvedere shopping center years ago and rooted in the many historic city public markets.

Food trucks at Farragut Square, District of Columbia

Is the restaurant and bar as urban pioneer just a fad or is it here to last? As presidential candidate Bernie Sanders reminds us regularly, vast swatches of the US population haven't enjoyed more disposable income in ages, so what feeds the trend to eat out more often? Do we have a food bubble that is ready to burst? Not likely.

In part, the boom is sustained by the other side of the income divide, those folks that have a lot of additional money and like to use it. The trophies of high income have become less showy. Instead of big cars and big McMansions, a chic city condo and walking down the street to a fancy food place now provide the feeling of having arrived. Without believing in Reaganomics, one has to concede that those high end culinary experiences trickle down until arugula is a staple in every salad. The melting pot, another cliche, becomes real in restaurants where fusion cuisine leaves hardly any combination of exotic ingredients unthinkable forging delicious new dishes in the hands of a skilled chef. Cooking as an art is endless, just like art itself.

Outdoor eating in Southpark San Diego, Ca (photo Archplan)

The demise of the car and the single family home in the suburbs as a status symbols also fuel the larger other side of the economic divide, for example those millennials who, thanks to high college debt and slow absorption in the labor market, are always squeezed for cash. But renting instead of buying a place to call home, and not buying a car leaves cash for craft beer, specialty coffee and locally sourced food.

Most importantly, though, the ever more hectic life still leaves little time to buy ingredients in a store and cook at home, a fact that initially brought about fast food chains and their drive thru lanes. Increasingly though, the lack of time is coupled with the insight that just wolfing down burgers with super sized sodas is not only unhealthy, it is also a less than satisfying experience.

By contrast, the locally owned restaurant, the food hall in an old warehouse, the micro brew pub in a former shop and even the refurbished chow wagon provide authenticity, social interaction, a real tangible experience and a sense of discovery. Even if the neighborhood up the street, or the city down the line essentially aim to provide those same experiences, their markets, farm to table restaurants, their breads, meals, coffee roasts, tea creations and craft beers are not identical: flavors and chefs are different, so is the decor, the architecture and the history which is drawn from other sources and times and thus Denver is really different from Austin or San Diego and even the hangouts in an old industrial burg like Pittsburgh don't look and feel the same as those in Baltimore.

Baltimore food cart tradition (photo: Baltimore Sun)

The snarky commentator in the Guardian, though, put the finger on the problem that restaurants are only a quite limited form of economic development and even as engines of urban renewal their horsepower isn't sufficient to turn the urban food deserts of dis-invested neighborhoods around where healthy food choices and sit-down restaurants remain as absent as the celebration of food in the public space in spite of many efforts and in spite of local history such as Baltimore's Arabber horse drawn food carts.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

Links:
Restaurants and Urban Revitalization