Back at the Olive Garden

We visited Raleigh, North Carolina, and went out to dinner at the Olive Garden, north of downtown. This was a pleasant Italian restaurant with massive portions and an unlimited supply of breadsticks. Apparently the price was right and the food was good, because it seemed that much of Raleigh waited outside for a table. Prospective diners received a disk that would ring once a table was ready. Most waited in the small lobby, or outside in front of the building. There wasn’t really enough space for all the people waiting—the architects had underestimated the restaurant’s popularity. Also, once outside the doors, the design’s quality dropped off considerably. Inside the space was comfortable and human scaled. But outside, on this property and apparently in the rest of Raleigh, the intention of the design was to provide a way to go from cars to the private realm. Outside, there was a bench or two, a little plaza and walkway, some trees, and that was it.

The maitre d’ estimated a thirty-minute wait for our table. We decided to be efficient and visit the drug store during our wait. There was no drugstore to walk to, so we got in the car and navigated down the wide arterial and subarterial roads surrounding the restaurant. Each of the arterial and subarterials collided at monumental intersections, with hundreds of feet of blacktop and cars queued in all directions. The traffic signals were timed for complex phases: through traffic, left turns, parts of left turns, multiple-lane left turns. Many of the intersections we drove through seemed to be of this massive scale. The surrounding turf featured either vast parking lots with stores and offices, or a bit further back, some housing developments cordoned off from the noise and dust of the arterial roads. So the place we were in was defined essentially by acres of asphalt, intermittently interrupted by isolated structures. This comprised the built environment of northern Raleigh.

We arrived at a road called the “Falls of Neuse.” For some reason I thought this road was the “Eyes of Newt.” The natives we traveled with thought this was not funny. En route to the drug store, the reservation disk activated and started beeping. It was much less than thirty minutes, and we were pleased that our table was ready so soon. We doubled back to the restaurant. Unfortunately, it wasn’t so simple to get there. We had to drive along several direction-separated arterials, and through the complex cordons of the signalized intersections. Eventually we made it back, learning that our table wasn’t ready after all. The disk activated because we were out of disk range. The devices were programmed to whine at a certain distance from the restaurant, thus reminding guests not to take them home. Otherwise you would be stuck with a continuously whining reservation disk, and who would want that?

So we had a few more minutes to see the sights of northern Raleigh on another loop to the drug store. There wasn’t much to see. Most areas had sidewalks, but no one was walking. This seemed to be true at all hours of the day, not just in the evening. In this area, one could drive for miles and not encounter a semblance of public space: no promenades, no urbane city streets, no river walks; nothing that resembled a downtown. Square miles of terrain had been transformed into a depressing, formless, placeless sprawl of arterial boulevards and football-field-sized intersections, with parking lots and glopspaces in between. Much of this infrastructure had been recently built, within the last decade or two. As in the restaurant, the private interior spaces that we saw were uniformly excellent. Interiors of housing, offices, and stores were comfortable, luxurious, and well designed.

The exterior, public spaces were a different story. What would it have taken to create a place, or some semblance of place, in the public spaces outside? The area around our hotel was quite nice, with some trees, a few fountains, and an attractive outdoor pool. The architects had cleverly wrapped the building structure around the pool deck on two sides. With landscaping on the open end of the triangular plan, a nice outdoor room was formed. Unfortunately, on the open edge of the triangle, the deck extended to the property line. Next door was a strip mall. A restaurant occupied the space immediately adjacent to the pool, and it also had an outdoor patio. This patio could have been placed next to the pool. Then the diners could watch the swimmers, and vice versa. Instead, the restaurant patio was placed next to the parking lot, and the hotel’s pool deck ended at a blank back wall of the strip mall building, overlooking air conditioning ducts and utility wiring. With some simple changes, a mini oasis of public space could have been created—no real change in cost, just some forethought and design sense. Instead, the two properties had no continuity and apparently no design relationship to one another. It was a lost opportunity—al fresco diners overlooked the sterile, steaming parking lot, and swimmers had to pretend that the third wall of the outside room, with its air conditioners and industrial ducts, wasn’t an afterthought. This small example of dysfunctional public space design had been repeated on a grand scale, consuming much of newly built Raleigh.

If you looked carefully along the arterials, you could find vestiges of the traditional North Carolina countryside in pockets: areas of woods, expansive fields with grazing horses, rolling piedmont. This was the terrain that was being transformed into suburbia. It struck me as a real-life but bad episode of Star Trek, where the Borg had decided to subsume all landscapes. Resistance was futile. We would become one of them. We would exist in a homogenized, formless, hellish, ugly landscape of endless driving, isolated in car cocoons. Village streets? Promenades? Walking? Interaction? These were things of distant memory, plowed over en route to WalMart.

Back at the Olive Garden, we finished our fill of the endless buttered breadsticks. There was a desert menu featuring very large concoctions, presented on UFO-sized plates. We hadn’t really completed the main course, so we decided to pass. It would have been good to take a nice walk after dinner to work off some of that pasta, but there was nowhere to walk to. The property did have a little trellised walkway alongside the restaurant to the parking lot. But it was a short walk, maybe enough to burn off one scoop of rigatoni and some sauce. We climbed back into the car, and drove down the massive, wide arterials, through sophisticated multilane, multiphased traffic signals, past acres of paved plazas, strip malls, office parks, and finally back to the hotel. Some kids were splashing in the pool. The sound of the water blended with the humming of the air conditioners perched on the blank utility wall next door.