WHAT THAT QUARTER-SECTION NEIGHBORHOOD LOOKED LIKE.

In a recent post about streetcar suburbs, I suggested that the organic sort of neighborhood a Strong Towns contributor suggested as an alternative sort of plat to the severely-zoned, twisting-streets-that-make-walking-a-challenge as well as producing traffic jams in conventional use today also works on a smaller scale.

Here's a look at what real streetcar neighborhoods look like.

That's a screen capture from a simulation I wrote years ago using the JB Bahn program, which has gotten a lot better since 1994, when I stumbled across it, and I'm toying with scaling my simulation using the new version to space out the streets further.  This is a look at the Sherman Park neighborhood of Milwaukee in the fall of 1929, just before the Depression, and if you look at the left, you'll see why I picked it.  The east-west car lines are on Center Street, North Avenue (yes, North is south of Center), Walnut Street, Vliet Street, State Street, and Wells Street.  Some of these car lines are parallel at less than the half-mile interval I suggested in the featureless plain model of the previous post.  The north-south lines are 35th Street, 27th Street, and then a few lines funnel onto Twelfth.  I ran out of program memory to put in more buildings to show how the commercial clusters occur at the crossings of car lines, and the residential neighborhoods are on the side streets.