Forced Into the Alley
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

I dreamed of a white Christmas and woke up disillusioned with New Urbanism. We’ve had 23 inches of white so far this month in Milwaukee. By itself, this is nice. My days have not been merry and bright, however, and it’s because of my alley.
When we bought our house in an old neighborhood, we bought into the idea of alleys, or I did and I persuaded Mrs. McIlheran to go along. An alley meant a safer sidewalk, since cars wouldn’t back out of driveways and run over our kids as they rode Big Wheels. A garage opening right onto an alley meant less of our lot taken up by a driveway. Lacking a driveway, we’d have less snow shoveling to do.
Sure. I was listening to urban planners. Wrong specialty. An economist would have explained how alleys, in Milwaukee at least, are a tragedy of the commons.
The city doesn’t plow alleys. You could persuade the neighbors to jointly hire a guy, but who’s got the energy, especially on a double-long block? Since plowing only makes sense if it’s done all the way from your garage to the street, past all those deadbeats who wouldn’t chip in, no one does it.
My alley eventually is navigable because enough people with pickup trucks mash down tracks. But backing across it and into my garage is impossible — those tracks become wheel-spinning traps. So my garage spends the winter housing my lawnmower. The car shivers on the street.
I’m not the only one. I compete for scarce plowed curb space with all the street’s other alley exiles. Mostly, I end up parked on frozen little Himalayas left by the plow while the guy with the Excursion takes up the dry pavement, the 4WD bum. Remember that study a few months back that found people really are friendlier in lower-density suburbs? It’s because they don’t have to circle the block as snow falls, looking for a parking space that they have hope of getting out of the next morning, I’m sure of it.
I’ve looked at alleys from both sides now. I envied them when I had a driveway. That was in Duluth, Minn. We got 135 inches of snow one year. I had no snowblower. I grew up out in the country with a 300-foot driveway and had to help shovel until the year my dad bought a plow for the tractor. So I’m aware of driveways’ drawbacks.
They’re not as numerous as rumored by the New Urbanists. These are the subspecies of urban planner who grow evangelical about the rediscovered joys of cities. They revel in porches and narrow streets. They design faux old-time towns in Florida. They say “walkable” a lot. They generally love alleys because they hide away cars and other unsightly things that emerged post-war (Spanish-American, that is).
Milwaukee is in the New Urbanist axis. Our former mayor, John Norquist, now runs the Congress for the New Urbanism out of Chicago, pretty much continuing what he did for 16 years in City Hall. That is, he talks about how pleasant city neighborhoods can be.
He’s quite convincing, sometimes even right. It’s nice to walk to the store instead of driving. Of course, if I want something other than a beer, a mortgage, car repairs, a sub sandwich, or fantastically overpriced organic groceries with less than a 15-minute hike I still have to drive despite my dense-packed neighborhood.
And there’s the alley. Plainly, that New Urbanist prescription has some tradeoffs, such as not being able to use the garage just when I most want one. Years of futile ice-chipping behind my empty garage have swayed me: I was wrong to have believed in alleys.
Other spores of doubt now germinate. New Urbanists like grids of streets on which traffic can disperse and reroute. It certainly can, so cars I’ve never seen before constantly speed down my street, discovering it as a shortcut. I’m starting to recall the way retrograde suburbanites enthuse over their cul de sacs, where traffic’s sparse. New Urbanists absolutely hate cul de sacs. They call them insular, not welcoming to strangers who want to stroll or drive through.
Which is the point, say home buyers, who continue to heavily favor cul de sacs, according to real estate agents. Who wants traffic connectivity when that translates as pizza delivery guys in pimped Honda Civics driving 40 miles an hour right past where your kids are playing?
Don’t tell anyone in City Hall I’m complaining. Norquist’s gone but the city remains doctrinaire. Who knows? It might install a traffic “calming” roundabout at the intersection. Several of these went in on handy streets near the University of Wisconsin campus. The flowers in the middle have a muffler-scarred look. That is, someone didn’t go round and about. People don’t always obey. They’re supposed to like 40-foot lots and alleys. Instead, they first abandoned those and built ranch houses with garages facing the street — New Urbanists hate that, too — in Milwaukee’s post-war reaches. Then their kids went still further out for more the same, with even bigger yards. New Urbanists say they must be miserable out there.
I’m not so sure. When I drive to visit my parents, out in exurbia, I pass houses with garages facing the street. Sometimes, the garage doors are open. I can see cars and pickup trucks parked inside, even during the winter. Imagine that.
Mr. McIlheran is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.