In Gotham's Shadow: Globalization and Community Change in Central New York

Appendix A: The Block Quintile Measure

159 Appendix A The Block Quintile Measure In order to compare the health of the central business districts in all three communities, a measure was necessarily developed with the intent of circumventing the problems associated with comparing communities of such disparate sizes. The definition of the central business district was coterminous with the extent of contiguous business buildings in Cooperstown and Hartwick. In Utica, the definition was taken from a 1950 report on arterial highways for the city (DPW 1950). The Block Quintile (BQ) Score is based on the assumption that a healthy city is also a pleasant environment in which to walk. Downtown areas in older communities typically developed to serve a predominantly pedestrian population, and Utica, Cooperstown, and Hartwick are no exception. As a result, all three communities had pedestrian-oriented central business districts in 1947 that contemporary news accounts and interviews indicate attempted to beautify the streetscape and lure pedestrians into shops. In most cases, the streetscape included buildings in close proximity to one another (or touching) that met the sidewalk in a line with other buildings. Occasionally , buildings would contain small plazas but this was not the norm. Especially in Utica, small parks and plazas were strategically placed in different locations around the downtown area and these functioned as places of rest and tranquility from the city. Based on these assumptions, the central business districts of each community were divided into blocks. A block was defined as one side of a street between two side streets. Each quintile was then coded as follows: Empty lots=0; parking lots=1; ordinary lawn and parking garages=2; buildings, parks, and plazas=3. The score is then summed for a block score with a maximum of fifteen. 160 In Gotham’s Shadow A weakness of the BQ score is that it fails to account for the individual characteristics of buildings, and as such it is theoretically possible for a rather dilapidated area with few demolished buildings to have a high BQ score. Similarly, it is only appropriate for use in areas where the dominant form of urbanization includes buildings built next to each other and at a common building line. Figure A.1. BQ Scores for Utica, Cooperstown, and Hartwick Utica Cooperstown Hartwick No. of Blocks (1947) 240 15 6 No. of Blocks (1997) 209 15 6 Mean (1947) 14.03 14.2 14.16 Mean (1997) 9.79 14.2 10.83 ...