Embrace the Grid
Hickory, North Carolina's urban fabric shows how connectivity is good for community and commerce.
Written By Adeleine Geitner
The street names in Hickory, North Carolina, are a running joke among locals. As Maine Avenue NE turns toward Lenoir-Rhyne University, the signs suddenly start reading 8th Street NE. 5th Street NW dead-ends into 7th Avenue NW and then picks up a mile later under the same name. In one neighborhood, 4th Street Circle, Place, and Lane NE all run parallel to each other. How did this happen? And what does it say about the way we do or don’t design our cities to grow and expand?
A little context: The city’s street layout is based on a numbered grid divided into four quadrants. The railroad tracks form the north/south divide and Center Street splits the city east/west, creating NW, NE, SW, and SE quadrants. Streets run north to south and avenues run west to east. Easy, no? As the city writes in its publicly available document “Helpful hints to navigate Hickory, NC [sic] streets,” the roads are “Actually…not that difficult to locate.” One only needs to “take a few moments to find the key to the pattern.”
Grids naturally accommodate density. According to officials in Hickory, the numbered quadrant layout was implemented for its simplicity, logistic sense, and uniformity and for being “flexible enough to accommodate growth.”
Knowing the key to the pattern, however, does not guarantee that a person hoping to visit a friend at 2nd Street Place SE will first think to drive to the end of 11th Avenue Drive. But is that such a crime? For all the grumbling, locals share good-natured laughs lamenting the complicated setup, and like the quirks of many Southern cities, the strangeness can be written off as “charm.”
Joking aside, Hickory’s grid is a rather beautiful thing. According to The Economist, “a mix of idealism and practicality” drove America’s adoption of the grid. In planning Philadelphia, William Penn, a Quaker, believed that if all streets were equal, the people among them would be as well. From a practical standpoint, the grid can’t be beat. “Roads are expensive to build. Laying them out in grids allows more buildings to sit alongside them, which can more easily be linked to sewage lines, electricity connections, and gas pipes.”
And grids naturally accommodate density. According to officials in Hickory, the numbered quadrant layout was implemented for its simplicity, logistic sense, and uniformity, and for being “flexible enough to accommodate growth.”
Anyone taking a brief glance at Hickory would not laud it for its density. The city is not without sprawl, as planned suburban developments have cropped up along the city’s outer edge in the last fifty years. But Hickory is a small city of only 43,000 folks. If it were planned as densely as, say, New York City, it would only be one and a half square miles (1.49, to be precise), as opposed to 30.7. That said, it’s likely that small, affordable cities like Hickory that are close to major metropolitan hubs will keep growing in popularity. And as that happens, the grid will continue to be a wonderful layout to use.
Hickory’s newest developments have popped up right in the heart of downtown, replacing a block-sized lot of often vacant parking, the unoccupied former courthouse, and an empty dirt plot. In total, the three new apartment complexes add roughly 250 units and two blocks of ground-level retail. All this growth has occurred within a block of Hickory’s walkable downtown hub, Union Square, and within Hickory’s earliest, most compact network of roads. With a clever grid already in place, Hickory is well-positioned to grow efficiently and incrementally.
Adeleine Geitner is the Duke Initiative for Urban Studies Fellow on Sprawl Repair and Nodal Development.