Another Independence Boulevard – lost opportunity or potential future?

Bologna's Independence Boulevard on a Monday morning in October. Photo: Mary Newsom

On a recent trip to Italy, we stopped for a night in the northern city of Bologna, home to some famous pasta sauces, the world's first university and a basilica where, legend has it, a German priest was so disgusted by the church's opulence he went back to Germany and – his name being Martin Luther
– started the Reformation.

It's also home to an Independence boulevard.  I didn't capitalize "Boulevard" because the official name of the street is Via dell' Indipendenza. In any case, it's a powerful reminder that a busy city thoroughfare need not be ugly.

Photo: Mary Newsom

Under the arcade

I took these photos about 9 a.m. on a Monday, and I took them during breaks in traffic, so they don't accurately convey the traffic, although it's safe to say it's far less than Charlotte's Independence Boulevard, which carries more than 100,000 vehicles a day in places.

Our Indy Boulevard began life in the 1950s as a four-lane U.S. highway (U.S. 74) that sundered a white, working class neighborhood as well as the city's first municipal park and its rose garden. Today, Independence Boulevard in Charlotte is either a freeway-style highway lined with sound walls or, where the freeway hasn't been built yet, a seemingly endless strip of bleak, now-bedraggled highway commercial development that had its heyday in the 1970s and '80s.

But in Bologna, first settled about 1,000 BC, via dell' Indipendenza looks different. We arrived on a Sunday evening and the street was jammed with people, and no cars. The street and several others are pedestrianized from 8 a.m. Saturday to 10 p.m. Sunday.

The street itself, like many of the old streets in the city center, is lined with an arcade, which protects pedestrians in bad weather. Under the arcades, many with vaulted ceilings, the sidewalks are terrazzo tile, or something similar. No chewing-gum-stained concrete or crumbling asphalt.

Is there any hope for our Independence Boulevard? I confess to being a pessimist about that. Streets, I've observed, set a development pattern that's difficult to change unless the government decides to buy up all the land, tear everything down, and start over with new development. They have tried that before here, and urban renewal was a brutal disaster.

Charlotte's Independence Boulevard, 2014. Photo: Nancy Pierce