Davis Square Somerville Infill and Small Development

[Charlie_mta]

Back in the 1950s and 60s, Davis Square was still a major shopping area. It had great department stores where we would buy our school clothes and everything else: Park Snows, Gorins, and Grants, plus a Woolworths, a Brighams restaurant, an excellent movie theater, a tobacco and newsstand store, two bus routes to Lechmere station, basically everything a kid like me could want. North Cambridge where I lived was the perfect walkable urban area with Davis Square nearby, plus small corner stores all over North Cambridge of every type (drug stores, bakeries, candy stores, etc.), and churches and schools, all within walking distance. We hardly ever drove anywhere.

I wish that post WW II America had continued to develop on that transit-oriented, walkable model instead of the dispersed auto-oriented suburbs that predominated, thanks to low density zoning and government policies on housing and transportation.