Peter Jensen

Marykay Simon in Pacific Beach

Can an alley change a San Diego neighborhood for the better? Alleys are appearing on plans for new San Diego neighborhoods after a half-century lull. One new master-planned housing development in the county has raised the possibility, and the idea has proponents within San Diego’s planning department.

Tens of thousands of San Diegans who live in houses built before 1960 (in most cases before 1940) still have an alley behind their property. In Mission Hills, Kensington, Bird Rock, and La Jolla, neighborhoods with alleys have become some of San Diego’s most desirable places to live. Yet in other neighborhoods, no more than a block or two away, alleys are viewed as an eyesore and security risk.

Prestige development, Scripps Ranch

Alleys are one reminder of a time when people seemed to know neighbors better, considered streets safer, and kept houses neater, in part because the mechanics of home life (trash cans, workshop activity, garden cuttings, and the automobile itself) were hidden in the rear.

Neighborhoods across America are eternally trying to revive this ideal, but the most recent movement is usually traced to the “neotraditional” town of Seaside, Florida, designed by architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk in the 1980s. Its planning includes narrower streets, village centers, and cottage-scale residences with front porches, widow’s walks, exterior balconies, and picture windows. Duany/ Plater-Zyberk’s aim was to create social intercourse, the kind of interaction you see on a street frequented by people walking their dogs, greeting their neighbors through a kitchen window facing the street, sitting on front porches, working in a front garden that isn’t dominated by a driveway.

Touring San Diego’s existing alley-backed neighborhoods feels like voyeurism if you’re used to looking at them from the front only. No street signs mark their mid-block entrances. You maybe surprised to see a car turn into a narrow opening between two houses that looks like a driveway but isn’t. The car disappears, swallowed by a narrow lane that is either straight (as in Pacific Beach) or as curvy as a medieval town lane (Mission Hills off Sunset Boulevard).

Once you’re in a San Diego alley, pavement narrows. It’s difficult for two cars to pass. Every home has a different back fence, combining into a running wall broken by garage doors, gates, and nooks for off-alley parking and trash cans. Some alleys are immaculate. Others are littered with battered furniture, especially sofas standing on end leaning against light poles. Many alleys have developed a symbiosis between homeowners and scavengers.

“I don’t mind people scavenging,” says Marykay Simon, whose residence backs up to an alley near Garnet Avenue in Pacific Beach. “We all put out things we think should be recycled, and they get picked up.” As she stands at her back gate, a 25-year-old Cadillac, its trunk open, drives by. In the trunk are several large bins filled with aluminum cans, glass, and other finds. Driver’s and passenger’s heads turn in unison — as if at a tennis match — scanning each side of the alley.

South Mission Beach

“I’m from Ocean Beach, New Jersey, and grew up with alleys,” she continues. “We rode our skateboards back there. Here I can ride my bike down P.B.’s long alleys and be out of traffic. They’re quieter. My dogs can run back here. And San Diego’s alleys are wider than some streets in other beach towns like Redondo Beach, where they’ve got cars parked down both sides.”

San Diego city planner Mike Stepner lives in a Mission Hills neighborhood crisscrossed by alleys. For Stepner an alley is far more than a service lane of unsightly commerce. On a recent drive in his vintage, bug-eyed Citroen, its undercarriage close to the road as he navigates Mission Hills’ deep dips between streets and alleys, Stepner talks of how the popularity of alleys in turn-of-the-century San Diego was tied to land use and the desire of developers to make some neighborhoods more affordable.

“They built two-on-ones across this mesa,” he says. “Lots [property] with a unit in front and one in back. This was before we got stricter with zoning. Or in some cases, they were zoned R-2, which outright allowed for two-on-ones. It was a way of providing home ownership when people couldn’t afford to live in a single-family house, one to a lot. The second unit off the alley was a rental and offset the cost.”

According to Stepner, this had another effect. Because people lived on alleys, especially pensioners, grandparents (hence the term “granny flat”), and servants, they became secondary streets or lanes with a life of their own. Today in Mission Hills’ neighborhoods a few blocks north and south of Fort Stockton Drive, Sunset Boulevard, and Juan Street, alleys have a different feeling than straight alleys in Pacific Beach. You sense the neighborhood — a face in a window, someone stepping through a back gate for a walk, and kids playing Rollerblade hockey, unafraid of traffic.

Alleys in San Diego’s early-1900s neighborhoods provided access for delivering ice, fuel oil, hay (and removing its end product). Snarls of electrical wires and telephone poles were strung down alleys, leaving streets free of clutter. Today alleys continue to work what may be their greatest advantage, allowing garages to be pulled off the front of a lot so the automobile doesn’t compete with humans for living space and a view of the street.

Kent Aden, vice-president at Baldwin Company working on the master plan for Otay Mesa, says, “An alley clearly removes the garage as the dominant architectural element at the front of a house. This is its number-one benefit. No one would argue that a garage door is more attractive than a nice porch and a few front windows.”

Once the front of a house is free of the two-, three-, or four-car garage door common in San Diego houses built since 1960 (the reason, along with increasing cost of land, that alleys disappeared), Aden maintains that the houses’ new front yard orientation creates a friendlier neighborhood and reverses the cocooning trend of people living in the rear of houses.

Says Aden, “You hear of people forming Neighborhood Watch groups, but they can’t see out the front of their houses. The house is 25 feet of garage with 8 feet left for a front door and one small window. With an alley plan, we can put more rooms up front.”

Architects call this “putting eyes on the street,” and it only happens from rooms where people spend time, such as kitchens, family rooms, a home office. “The larger issue of getting neighbor to know neighbor involves much more than alleys,” said Aden, “but getting people to look out the front of their house again is a positive. Other positives include less car use on main streets, making it safer for kids. And I think that the workshop aspects of a house, changing the car’s oil for example, fits more appropriately on an alley than adjacent to your front door.”

Jan Bast, interior designer and past president of the American Society of Interior Designers, San Diego chapter, has lived on a Kensington alley for more than 20 years. “The day we moved in, someone got shot in our alley by the police,” she says. “I don’t know what’s going on back there behind the fences, and it feels like someone could access our property. It’s a little out of my control. On the other hand, it’s nice to put the trash back there instead of in the front. It buffers me from neighbors across the back fence, and one of my pet peeves is subdivisions with only garages out front. Here the house is the important part of a neighborhood, not the garage.”

Bast’s husband spends more time in the alley than she does. He has his workshop in the garage. And she admits to the alley’s social aspect, “People walk their dogs down the alley and meet each other all the time.”

Regarding violent crime in alleys, officer Jason McAnnally, SDPD, who works the Pacific/Mission Beach area says, “Generally alleys are no more problem than streets. I’ve never noticed any difference. The main problem is parking, and we ticket for alley parking violations.”

Muriel Stricklane at the San Diego Historical Society, who catalogs historic maps, is especially intrigued by the jog in Fourth Avenue at Upas, and the way Second Avenue vanishes. Here you’ll find alleys north of Upas but not south. “It appears that early alleys were placed at the whim of developers,” she says. “Brooks developed the area north of Upas in 1889 in line with the north edge of Balboa Park [and decided on alleys].”

La Jolla historian Pat Schaechlin considers her community’s alleys to be “streetlets.” They are, in fact, called lanes and appear on maps. “They were — and are — no different than streets,” she says. “They just happened to be narrower. Houses were never discarded here, and they’d be moved onto the lanes from other properties as larger houses were built.” Schaechlin’s favorite lane is Elfreths, near the west side of La Jolla High School, at Rushville Street. Unlike its first cousins Drury, Bishops, Bluebird, Dune, Flint, and Roslyn, it’s not on most maps. “It reminds me of New Orleans with its little houses,” she says.

Landscape architect Roger DeWeese grew up in Coronado and remembers that back yards were “no man’s lands” in the ’40s and ’50s. Houses weren’t oriented to the rear, and their back elevations were quite utilitarian. One didn’t often live at the rear of a typical house pre-1950.

“We’d drag stuff back there [the back yard] and burn it. The steel doors on our incinerator would get red hot from burning eucalyptus leaves. Now you can’t incinerate anything, and we have to find ways to drag it all to the front curb to be picked up.”

With the demise of the back yard as a place to dispose of trash, designers began to turn this portion of the lot into an outdoor living space. Soon it was more natural to place a garage at the front of the house rather than in the back yard, where it took up space.

San Diego’s most evolved system of alleys is in lower Mission Beach, where the front yards of most beach cottages face only a pedestrian court (a sidewalk with no street at all) running at right angles to the beach or bay. The entire grid system of auto access consists of alleys, with no streets except for Mission Boulevard. Here all residents’ outdoor living takes place in front yards, in full view of neighbors (no high fences allowed); and during a summer evening at dinnertime, hardly a house doesn’t have people outside, barbecuing, joining their neighbors to chat, calling to each other up and down the court, joking, recounting the day...a true sense of neighborhood.

Mission Beach’s access to sand and waves is the unifying amenity of the neighborhood, and a casual, pedestrian lifestyle is desired by all who move there. Aden, on the other hand, worries that alleys may not be able to achieve full consumer acceptance again in inland areas.

“Putting in alleys can lead to more grading,” says Aden, “because you need a flat site. You have to ‘hit grade’ [for drainage and access] at the front and back of alley houses, rather than just the front. Detached garages cost more, and people are giving up part of their back yard [to have them]. Adding architectural elements to the house’s front [no longer dominated by a huge set of garage doors] adds cost. Certain planting aspects are harder, too. Security issues, who maintains, how well...all are a concern. And does the average consumer even want to sit on a porch if that’s what we’re trying to add in front?

“Still, in my opinion, the trade-offs are worth it.”

On one recent summer evening, a homeowner in a new neighborhood at the northern edge of Scripps Ranch pauses to talk. He’s out for a bike ride with his small son through the Prestige project off Pomerado Road. Here each single-family, detached house has a facade that appears to be almost all garage door with adjacent front door. The houses are extremely close to the sidewalk and street. Front yards are vestigial, at best. One is reminded of a lane inside a mini-storage center.

Did the dominance of garage doors up and down the street bother him? Not at all. “The houses are dramatic inside, and the neighborhood is very nice, very safe,” he says. As they ride away, the street, in diminishing perspective, looks more and more like an alley after all — an alley at the front rather than the rear. Almost all of the garage doors are closed. The bicycle riders are the neighborhood’s only sign of life.