While New York is contemplating large sections of Broadway to auto traffic, The 13th Floor reports that Boston is considering going in the opposite direction for one of its pedestrian shopping malls. The folks in Boston are seeking to take a desolate section of the city and liven it up by sending in the clowns, uh, the cars. Their model is Chicago which closed off its state street to auto traffic in the hopes of creating one of these pedestrian paradises. Only problem, it didn’t quite work out that way:

But instead of enlivening the street, the mall isolated it from the rest of downtown. Businesses closed, shoppers fled, pigeons and trash proliferated, and the street emptied into a wasteland at night. Like their counterparts in Boston, Chicago officials dispatched fruit vendors, hoping they would bring back shoppers.

They didn’t.

Under mounting pressure from business owners, the city made a fateful decision in 1996. Like hundreds of cities across the country, it decided to rip up its pedestrian mall and reconnect State Street to downtown.

These days, State Street is at the heart of a downtown renaissance.

Hmmm… we’ve never made that mistake in Philadelphia, have we?

Anyway, since I usually write about how evil cars can be in the urban environment, I should note that it’s possible for them to be part of a healthy downtown mix as long as sufficient measures are taken to protect pedestrians.