Westerwood gets a touch a beauty on Hill Street
Marsh Prause, a long-time leader in the Westerwood neighborhood, says the city has made amends, to some extent, for a design eyesore created many years ago in the neighborhood.
To connect Westerwood to Smith Street and Battleground Avenue, two feeder streets taking traffic in and out of downtown, the city extended Hill Street across those two streets to North Mendenhall. The latter is one of Westerwood's key streets.
The extension meant the removal of three quaint bungalows that faced North Mendenhall. The four-lane connector created a wide gap along Mendenhall and amounted to what Prause calls an "asphalt jungle."
Now, he says, the city has narrowed the pavement by building a median in the center of the connector from Smith to Mendenhall.
The new median, once landscaped, which Prause says the Westerwood Neighborhood Association will pay for, "should restore some of the area's aesthetics and help to slow traffic on North Mendenhall."
Prause's e-mail was in a response to a story Friday about the city's reembracing roundabouts to keep traffic flowing. The city had abandoned most traffic circles in the 1940s, with the exception of one at East Lake and Garland drives in Westerwood.
Prause says Westerwood is proud of its roundabout and plans to put neighborhood sign near it soon.
The roundabout story also brought a response from Janette Wright, who grew up in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where roundabouts are common.
She said the circles make "so much sense to me and was I surprised that here in the states you didn't see them ... In Amsterdam ... they seem to be changing regular crossroads to roundabouts all the time."
A reader of the Rhino Times called the roundabout under construction in the Lake Jeanette community "the circle of death," but Wright says roundabouts shouldn't be feared.
"As long as you know the traffic on the roundabout has the right of way, it is a no-brainer to use them. Even big trucks and buses go with ease around that little circle. They even have roundabouts with three lanes in the Netherlands. It works."
Greensboro's two new roundabouts,in Lake Jeanette and at Greene and McGee streets downtown, are only one wide lane.
"I am glad to see them make a come back here," Wright continues, "and hope they will eventually get rid of four-way stops where nobody seems to know what they are doing."