It seems like most cities designed before about 1920 or so featured alleys that ran down the middle of each block, providing a rear access to the house. In Chicago, anyway, the alleys have garages, to help keep cars of the streets, and are used for trash collection. But the alley seems to have dissappeared from the vocabulary of urban planning. What happened?
I can only guess the same is true for America, but in Australian cities, the sewer-connected flush toilet killed alleys and back lanes.
Well-to-do people in the old days liked to pretend they didn’t have to shit, so there were alleys for the “night soil man” to come and collect his ah… “goods”, out of sight of the neighbours. No poo collectors = no alleys, especially when they occupied valuable real estate, and could be turned into larger yards, etc.
The alleys survived a little longer in downtown areas here, until they were swallowed up by the bigger footprints of mid-century office towers.
Some were razed due to sporadic outbreaks of plague in the 1900s, as well.
The average lot is smaller too. It’s all about maximizing land usage. How many more houses can you build in a subdivision if you eliminate alleyways?
Did I hear somewhere that New York doesn’t have, or maybe has very few alleys? I don’t see how a major city could function without them.
I think that in more modern homes, people want the garage to be connected to the house. In my neighborhood, a third of the rowhouses have carriage houses which were converted to garages but none of them connect to the house.
I do like the concept of the alley. The trash cans go there instead of in front of the house where they look a little unsightly and are more susceptible to vandalism and theft.
Wild guess, based on relative ages of houes on alleys and those not: the advent of the attached garage. My house dates from the late 1880’s. The garage is obviously not attached, and is behind the house, on an alley. This hides it, somewhat, from the street. Suburban-style attached garages are (in theory) designed to fit in better with the whole house, and thus don’t need to be hidden as much.
When we were looking at houses, I leaned much more towards those with unattached garages on alleys, as I HATE the look of 95% of attached garages. It ruins the look of a perfectly good house. "Look at ME!! I’ve got a 2/3 CAR GARAGE and a house.
I don’t think it was cars they built the alleys for. More likely, it was horses. And other smelly stuff, as mentioned in Loadeddog’s post.
We modern folks have less smelly stuff, so we don’t need alleys.
But it would be interesting if a professional city planner could explain the details of zoning for alleys, and their later demise: Who owned the land, who payed the building costs, etc,.Who decided to stop building them (and when?) , and was it a controversial decision at the time? Did people worry that having/not having an alley would affect their property prices?.
I think we need to clarify the timeline of this. The 1950s American Dream, conspicuous consumerism thing might have cemented the fate of the remaining alleys, but I think most of them were already gone by then. And, in Australia at least, 1950s blocks of land were way bigger than 1900s ones. It’s only now that they’re getting smaller again.
1900s: small cottage on small land (tenements, workers’ cottages)
1950s: modest bungalow on big land (garage, pool, lawnmower, etc)
2000s: huge house on modest land (McMansion)
I think alleys died for the most part sometime before the 1950s.
True. New York (or, at least, Manhattan) has very few alleys. On the typical block, garbage collection is at the curb. It’s one reason for the abundant garbage that blows around on the streets and collects at the curb. (Obviously, skyscrapers or other big buildings will have their own concealed infrastructures for gathering garbage and shipping it out.)
I live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of DC. It’s interesting: Most of the housing is between 100 and 150 years old. We live in a rowhouse with alley access, which is very convenient for various reasons. We have friends who live in a house of similar age to ours, but their block has no alley. I don’t know what accounts for the difference. It is possible that in the pre-plumbing days, there was an alley, but it was sealed up and converted to yard/patio space as a result of rising real estate prices and the luxury of indoor plumbing.
Garages are quite rare in our neighborhood. Most people park on the street in front of their house, or, if they have alley access and a large back area, in a parking space on their property in back of the house.
(As an aside, our friends without alley access are about to begin a massive renovation/adding-on project. Every piece of raw material and equipment involved in this $400,000 job must come through their front door. They’re moving out for six months.)
Plenty of alleys exist where I live in the UK
- passages where just about two people can walk side by side.
As I understand it, only fashionable areas had alleys, as they were “dead” real estate paid for by those buying the lots and willing to pay a premium for the nicety of having refuse collection out of sight. Working class areas had all that stuff up close in the main street, as evidenced by all the old tales of a gentleman walking closer to the edge of the footpath so the lady would not only avoid the splashes of passing carriages, but also the contents of chamber pots hurled out of upstairs windows.
The alleys here even tend to retain their posh, euphemistic names. There’ll be Riley Street, for example, then “Little Riley Street”.
My house is a 1920s four-square house in a humongous neighborhood (think: this whole side of Decatur) of 1920s four-squares and bungalows, and there are alleys everywhere. All of these houses were built with fully functional modern plumbing and sewer lines. The alleys were, and are, for garbage collection access.
But the modern subdivisions in northern Decatur have no alleys, and you put your trash cans out on the curb. Land got too expensive to have alleys behind the houses, so the garbageman just drives up and down the street.
Also, the older neighborhoods, say pre-1920s, that didn’t have indoor plumbing installed had the home’s privy out behind the house, as far away from it as the lot line would allow, which would need to be cleaned out once a year, and that also was what the alley was for. You don’t want the privy-cleaner’s wagon out in front of the house. 
My parents live in a small town, and they had an 1860s home on a corner lot, whose side yard backed onto the entrance to a defunct alley that had been unused for so long that grass grew on it and people simply treated it as part of their yards. So my dad very quietly went to a town zoning meeting one night and officially petitioned that that the however-many-square-feet-it-was of this former back alley be formally added to his lot. And it was made so. He was mighty braced about that.
I grew up in a house in southern California that was built in 1953, and all the neighborhoods had alleys.
Calgary is awash in alleys. Prior to Cowgary, I’d lived in Ottawa, which has very few. Victoria has some but not a lot.
It seems hit or miss as to which streets have an alley in DC. A couple of streets up from us doesn’t but in comparison they have gigantic front yards. I’ve noticed that the streets with the smaller houses tend not to have alleys but it really is hit or miss.
There is a massive carriage house in the alley behind my house that must have been a business at one point. It is a two story building that spans the length of two or three houses. It is also separately deeded from the houses. Someone bought it with the intention of building condos although I believe that the project isn’t going to go anywhere.
Here is an note about an article about what happend to alleys.
Couldn’t find the article, though.
I always thought they had alleys so you could throw the ugly, smelly, disease-causing things there, and not have to see them when you leave for work.
Alleys are also the name for marbles in the UK
I started an alleys nostalgia thread in MPSIMS. Not much nostalgia but mine, yet.