The Need for Small Blocks
In chapter 9, The Need for Small Blocks, Jacobs returns to a discussion of block sizes with an extended discourse on the area surrounding her dentist's office, located on a long block on 86th street between Columbus Ave. and Central Park West. The long residential blocks limit the number of routes available to neighborhood residents and visitors while concentrating a monotony on Columbus Avenue of, "endless stores and a depressing predominance of commercial standardization." The total effect is a, "Great Blight of Dullness" - a term she also uses to describe the seemingly endless residential streets of suburbia. As an alternative, she proposes how the neighborhood could be "opened up" and diversified by splitting the block with additional avenues in a style similar to that used in Rockefeller Center (Jacobs 1961, 233 - 236). She returns to a brief mention of this suggestion in chapter 19, "Visual Order: Its Limitations and Possibilities." (Jacobs 1961, 495)
West 94th Street
West 96th Street