welcome to the Blacktop
The Blacktop. It surrounds us. It’s under our feet, our cars, our office buildings and homes. It is the continuous datum of our urban existence. In Los Angeles it is impossible to escape the blacktop. From work to home and back again, our daily trajectories skim on the cracked, dark surface of this metropolitan sea. Appointments, meetings, dates, and commitments are held in its surface tension. There is not a day and few a moment that we step off, separate from the Blacktop. It is our foundation, the ever-present facilitator of all commuter activity. We are indebted and ignorantly devoted, we yearn for escape.
The Blacktop. It surrounds us. It’s under our feet, our cars, our office buildings and homes. It is the continuous datum of our urban existence. But this place, this shop of coffee and goods, is separate, set back, secluded. It is an homage to the blacktop; a herald to a time more playful and naive. For a blacktop is not only the piping tar pitch pumping through the arteries of Los Angles, the Blacktop is also where kids play... where we once played, and now will play again. A place of meeting; both intentional and impromptu, of conversation and reflection. It will stand as the perfect companion to the act of socializing, sitting, sharing, drinking... Here, at the core of the Art’s District, is a space both new and familiar to house a budding community. Where strolling neighbors wave, and students work. It is a place for all characters of the street—of the city—to move momentarily from one blacktop to another.
Successful urban space is characterized by an intuitively human infrastructure. In William Whyte’s the Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, he outlines basic principles that facilitate human use within an urban environment. Through studies of parks, plazas and patios in American cities,Whyte found that successful urban spaces were characterized by an abundance of sitting space (both fixed and mobile), access to food and drink, and a symbiotic relationship to the street and sidewalk.¹ A successful urban space can transcend into a comfortable social environment beyond the homeplace or work-place, it can become a third place, a concept popularized by social scientist Ray Oldenburg. Around these places, communities grow, and become fortified. Oldenburg argues that our third places are hubs that promote health, happiness, and civic engagement in our daily lives.²
“If we sell 10 cups of coffee or 200, it doesn’t matter. As long as we build community, we’re happy,” said co-owner Tyler Wilson. The Blacktop is a place where many of these phenomena already occur. From the principles characterizing Whyte’s small urban spaces, to the feeling and atmosphere of Oldenburg’s third places, the Blacktop is a site primed for success. Here, we find Blacktop’s collision into architecture. Although impactful and inspiring, the outlines provided by Whyte and Oldenburg are general, whereas architecture is specific.
1. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Dir. William Whyte. Municipal Art Society of New York, 1979. DVD. 2. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. New York: Marlowe, 1999. Print.
August 6th, 2:00pm, Blacktop Coffee A cool LA summer afternoon; cars and people idly traverse third street, their presence felt but it never reaches far from the street’s edge. The patio at Blacktop is removed from this edge, although only by the sidewalk’s width, from this thorough fare street that connects the Art’s District east to west. I sit in shade, a semi-shade, facing an empty mauve wall across the street. Its brick and boarded windows catch heavy sun rays and art deco motifs serve as a backdrop for dog walkers, runners, and people
going to and from meetings—to grab a late lunch sausage at Wursteche a block away. A truck stops in the middle of third street, men unload empty beer kegs. They juggle the kegs to type the passcode, open the door, and return minutes later with a new keg. I take a sip of Ethiopian Dark Delicacy, Kory swirls and swills his Iced-Cascade. People meander in and out the cafe doors. They wave, shake, sit, and lean in conversation.
The seating patterns on the Blacktop revealed themselves over the course of a morning. Users formed intuitively with respect to three major organizing elements: the corners, the doors, and the trees. Users came as both individuals and as groups, with most groups only temporarily exceeding three people. 10:45 a lull in traffic at the Blacktop, three disparate individuals; we remain in the corner 11:00 another group of two enters for lunch and coffee 12:00 the Blacktop is at full capacity, with five different groups enjoying coffee and food. significant space remains between the groups, however, without proper infrastructure, users cannot enjoy/maximize the space.
August 7th, 10:00am, Blacktop Patio The morning rush is beginning to thin and Guerilla Taco’s is in full operation. It’s a comfortable seventy degrees, the sun is just emerging from the clouds, and people stand in groups around the three planter boxes that delineate the edge between the patio and the sidewalk. Long benches and scattered chairs and stools (the Patio’s existing infrastructure) are lifted and dragged to form circles and clusters for meetings, groups of two, three, and four. The flow of traffic is gentle, both vehicular and pedestrian. The distant murmurs of the city echo a tranquil hum. 12:02pm The line has grown at the taco truck. It’s location is central, the most populated area on the patio. Adjacent space is secondary space. People duck under it’s awning to order and idly wander away while they wait for their name’s to be called. The truck acts as a second wall, temporarily enclosing the Blacktop patio from the street. It confronts all sidewalk passerby’s and creates a space of felt continuity, a transient enclosure that extends from the doors of the cafe to the edge of the street.
Out front of 826 E. 3rd Street people gather. A multitude of activities come together in this old brick building. It is an incubator for entrepreneurs, a store room and prep kitchen, an office space, and a shop for unique specialty goods. Amidst these intersecting and overlapping spheres is Blacktop coffee. Inside there are no seats or tables. A marble countertop holds pastries and an espresso machine. Two men smile lazily from behind the machine, taking orders, pulling shots. This is the coffee, out front is the Blacktop. As the young and wise, the studious and entrepreneurial, the artistic and playful, make their way from inside to the patio, they move organically and independently. Some move back to the street immediately, back to work, onto somewhere else. Some cluster together in corners. Others sit alone near the trees.
The Blacktop extends to the structure of the city surrounding it; unified, yet distinguished.The Blacktop is like it’s people: playful, bold, elegant and secretive; rich in experience. Unlike the buildings, who still speak to a different history. Of the abandoned industry, of the artists and vagrants in five cent sq/ft studios, of the urban dinge and decay slowly being washed off walls and sidewalks. The Blacktop remembers this too. And yet, the Blacktop looks to the future: an infrastructure with a mind not only to what it might be, but also to what we wish it to be.