Suburbia to beyond

       Suburbia- Boulder Point

The concept of suburban neighborhoods came about with the mass production of automobiles and the latter construction of nice, maintained, accessible roadways. People who could get places much easier and quicker and soon everyone had a car, this in turn allowed people who wanted to live away from the busy city to do so, while still commuting to their job and errands in the commercial district in the city.

       The suburban neighborhood that we looked at for this class, is a great part of town. I live in the Arbors condominiums which is just down the hill from the Boulder Point neighborhood. First off i noticed the houses were all different colors and quite well maintained; everything including sheds and main building attachments were freshly painted matching colors. Even the fences were nicely painted/finished or deliberately made to look rustic.

The yards of these houses are all maintained but they are very picturesque. Not very many of the yards that I saw were grass, but rock and shrubs and small trees, which is great for the water conservation movement. There are a lot of Ponderosa Pines in front yards and even more in the backyards. All these houses have at least two are three car garages, and the ones that are open sometimes didnt even have room for more than one car, they rest was packed with all sorts of different stuff. The garages all had entrances to the house, and in some cases they had doors too even more places. The houses with these grand garages usually had even more grand front entrances, with carved wooden pillars and stone steps, most of these facades were build on the front of house facing the street, but again, there were also less grand but not shabby external entrances on other sides of the houses.

The driveways of all these houses were paved with concrete and it was not oil spotted or seriously damaged, the asphalt in the road is recently tarred and properly painted with appropriate markings. This is interesting for me because there is a significant of geologic activity in Flagstaff, so it really must be high maintenance to keep all the asphalt and concrete in this neighborhood in good repair, and if they were not regularly maintained the sidewalk would look like the sidewalks around the Uni Heights Apartments, which are very cracked and have major differences in the heights of the slabs. The exception to the great neighborhood street repair is going west on University because it is FILLED with potholes and crap. In spirit of the civil engineering we talked about this is a picture of the LOVELY well maintained, car safe curb in Boulder Point.