Item 09 - Fairview Street Improvement Project

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Architectural History Evaluation national "good roads" campaigns. In response, the federal government established the Office of Road Inquiry in the Department of Agriculture to study new road building techniques (Jackson 1998). Dusty during summer months and muddy during the winter and spring, unpaved roads played havoc with wagons, carriages, and bicycles. Plank roads made from lumber first appeared in California during the 1850s. Gravel roads and macadam, a form of compacted gravel coated with oil, came into use during the late 19th century. Finally, after 1900, concrete roads topped by a mixture of bitumen, aggregate, and sand called asphalt became the standard modern road surface. Durable, smooth, and impervious to water, asphalt withstood winter weather, reduced vehicular wear and tear, and better facilitated drainage (Kostof 1992). During the 19th century Americans built new towns and cities along rivers, canals, wagon roads, railroads, and highways. Most new towns and cities began with plats for rectilinear street grids filed at a county recorder's offices. Once the plat filed, its streets and building lots became legal entities on the land. By creating right-angled streets and alleys, street grids simplified the work of staking out rectangular property boundaries and describing lots in written deeds. For growing towns and cities, street grids also simplified growth, as developers on the edge of town platted new additions simply by extending straight streets into surrounding rural areas (Reps 1965). As they matured and grew during the 19th and 20th centuries, many American cities and towns became incorporated under state charters. Incorporation transferred responsibility for street maintenance from county boards of supervisors to city governments. Incorporation also allowed city leaders to issue bonds and take on debt, which they used to finance modern street improvements such as paving, curbs, gutters, sidewalks, streetcar rails, and sanitation features such as sewers, storm drains, and water mains, which engineers typically buried beneath city streets (Monkkonen 1988). After 1910, as automobile usage surged, and as suburbanization occurred on the edges of town and cities in California and elsewhere, city planners began articulating a hierarchy of streets to distinguish residential roads, collector roads, arterial roads, and highways, each handling progressively higher volumes of traffic. Through the remainder of the twentieth century, as commercial and residential growth supplanted farms and ranches on the edges of California towns and cities, many rural county roads became adapted to suit the new suburban landscape. In many places, older two-lane rural roads became two- and four-lane suburban arterial streets lined with shopping centers and parking lots; others became two-lane collector streets lined with new residential subdivisions. In 1936, the FHA, a New Deal program designed to boost mortgage lending in the United States, developed design standards for new suburban residential streets. FHA standards called for quieter streets with T-intersections, cul-de-sacs, and curvilinear patterns in an effort to slow traffic. With few exceptions, homebuilders in California and other western states after 1940 adhered to FHA standards; homebuilders also eliminated alleys behind residential properties in favor driveways leading to street-facing garages (Kostof 1991).After 1960, homebuilders also began creating large master planned suburban developments featuring winding arterial parkways deliberately separated from residential zones to permit higher speeds. ECORP Consulting, Inc. 12 January 2025 Fairview Street Widening Project 2024-088.03 9-103