Our Rivers Running Through It

Many cities are built near the intersection of waterways with transportation corridors. Historically, the two - water and transportation routes - were often one and the same. Hence many memorable urban vistas today are framed by water. In earlier times water was a source of factory power and a crude discharge route for commercial waste. Waterfronts were not the most scenic vistas of a city. Now cities are attentive to the enjoyment of waterways, and their attractiveness as much as their necessity. Tourism and community identity are often tied together with the embrace of the water by a city - I think of Wilmington, NC's Cape Fear River alongside downtown, or Shockoe Slip along the James in Richmond, VA, and San Antonio, TX's River Walk. A regional town well-admired (if not outright envied) is Greenville, SC, which took the falls of the Reedy River - the power source of a century ago - and made the area around it into a wooded park, an urban strollway, the venue of their performing arts center, and the site of a dramatically designed pedestrian bridge which celebrates the possibilities of place.

I have often thought it would have been nice had the Moravian founders of Winston-Salem located the main town of Wachovia settlement along the banks of the Yadkin rather than on one of the three forks of Muddy Creek. I think that way until flood season, of course, when I'm reminded that topography can make not all rivers equal blessings to their neighbors. Unusual Iowa floods this week show that some floodplains are just too easily breached to make of waterfronts a full community embrace. Levees and floodwalls have to trump aesthetics. My vacation memory of Columbus, OH will be of an impressive city hall statue of the city's namesake overlooking what appeared to be a large concrete culvert snaking through town. I didn't know at the the time that floods had been such a problem on the Scioto River that the 1993 floodwall had been hailed as rescuing the development prospects of the westside Franklinton neighborhood. I only knew the 2003 drought made the concrete-lined riverbed a disruption to a pleasant urban sunset.

Winston-Salem's downtown has two main transportation arteries running through it: the north-south US 52, and the east-west Business 40 interstate. These roads frame the downtown view for guests and residents. We can treat them with utility in mind only, as our forefathers did once out of necessity with rivers. Or we can fashion transportation corridors for both beauty and utility. More easily than with a natural riverbed, we can alter topography on a roadway, predict and channel traffic flow. And if the general boundaries of where our roadways will be are set, their presentation through our urban heart is not. The first two photos of Greenville's Reedy River Falls are from the Falls Park website, as recommended by friend and former Greenville reference librarian Bill McRee. The Columbus skyline, along a more full Scioto River, is from the City utility department's Franklinton floodwall page. The Ponte Vecchio, below on the Arno, is both a place of maximized utility and a lasting symbol of beautiful Florence, Italy (and it's near, btw, both a great history of science museum and the restaurant where this southern blogger first tasted tortellini in 1982, long before it was an item in the local supermarket...)