Alleys Are Actually Pretty Cool

These houses have no driveway. This is because they were built before cars were common. If a deliveryman wanted to drop something off, the horse could do that in back, from the alley. Later, of course, the owners had a car, and still later, multiple cars, and those could also be parked in back via the alley. This old-fashioned arrangement has several advantages:

• there are never any trash bins cluttering the street
• there are no curb cuts, hence no impediments to pedestrians and safer rides for cyclists
• there is no protruding garage "snout" to distract attention from the house and plantings
• utilities can be handled in the alley, again leaving the front looking and feeling better

So the next time you see one of these relics of an earlier era, instead of thinking, "not as pretty as the street" you might reframe that as "keeping the messy and ugly stuff away from the street."