Postcard from West Superior Street

Four lanes of traffic, plus parking. Glory days.

It was toward the end of 1995 when the switch was made to angled parking and two lanes of traffic on Superior Street. I thought at the time that it was going to be a disaster, with cars jammed up behind buses at bus stops and people backing out of angled spots with limited visibility into the compacted traffic of the single lanes.

But I have to admit it didn't end up being bad at all. On the benefit side, I remember a claim at the time that the number of parking spaces increased with the switch to diagonal parking -- but I don't have any numbers to back that up or provide any sense of whether the increase was significant. On the downside, traffic is obviously a bit slower, but that's part of what some people wanted in order to make it safer for pedestrians.

The newest vehicle I can make out looks to be a 1958 or 1959 Plymouth parked on the left -- red with the popular fins of that era. The rest of the cars look to be early 1950s to mid-1950s era.