DATE: Tuesday, April 8, 1997                TAG: 9704080040

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY ALEX MARSHALL, CORRESPONDENT 

                                            LENGTH:  111 lines

NEW URBANISM: THE BEST OF CITY LIVING IN THE SUBURBS?

CHESAPEAKE HAS its share of new subdivisions, but none of them looks anything like Warrington Hall, a new project in the center of the sprawling suburban city.

European style traffic circles? Townhouses with front doors on the street? A main avenue with shops and offices?

Will this project, recently approved by the City Council despite protests by neighbors, succeed?

Certainly its novelty had something to do with its neighbors' antipathy. Surrounding residents, who live in the more standard suburbs of cul-de-sacs and Colonials, complained that Warrington Hall would be low-rent, high-density sprawl. After the council approved it, they started a petition campaign, ultimately unsuccessful, to force a reconsideration.

Warrington Hall is an example of New Urbanism, a style of planning and development that is gaining adherents. The theory says new subdivisions can be built with some of the old-fashioned advantages of urban life, such as corner stores and walkable destinations. It's based on design standards of 19th century neighborhoods and towns.

The philosophy has attracted tremendous attention as a way out of what seems like the dead-end of suburban sprawl, with its traffic jams, environmental destructiveness and impersonality. Newsweek put New Urbanism on its cover. Some politicians have embraced it, and some cities have rewritten their zoning codes based on it. A few dozen New Urban developments are under construction around the country.

In Hampton Roads, in addition to Warrington Hall, the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority embraced New Urbanism for a neighborhood planned for a section of East Ocean View, which is now being cleared. Andres Duany, the leading proponent and creator of New Urbanism, designed the planned neighborhood.

There's an interesting connection between Duany and Carroll Williamson, the local landowner who both designed Warrington Hall and owns the land.

Williamson grew up in what is now Chesapeake, part of a farming family in that area. However, Williamson, now in his 50s, left Chesapeake in the late 1960s and became a landscape architect with an office in Cambridge, Mass. A few years ago, Duany taught a course on New Urbanism in Cambridge at Harvard University.

Williamson took the course. Intrigued by Duany's theories, Williamson said in an interview, he decided to do something better with his Chesapeake land than the standard subdivision. Williamson teamed up with local designer Gerald Porterfield, who has pioneered ways to make subdivisions more convenient and livable.

The result is a subdivision plan that is radically different from neighboring Tallwood Estates and Clearfield. And the differences, at least on paper, seem quite nice.

Motorists will enter the development from Butts Station Road and drive down something called Warrington Boulevard. This street will include a central traffic circle and be lined with stores, shops and offices. Townhouses, usually hidden in the back of a development, will face the street, with parking in the back.

Most of the development will be built around a series of plazas and squares, including one that will preserve the old farm house of Henry Butt that was built in 1814. This series of parks will give the development a feeling of both openness and formality. Larger single-family homes will be on the outer perimeter of the neighborhood, most with alleys in the back for parking.

But all this assumes that people will buy such homes, and that commercial interests will be attracted to retail space and offices in a neighborhood. It also assumes that the design concepts like alleys and traffic circles, adapted from historic towns and cities, will function in modern suburbia. There are doubts on all of these questions.

Around the country, the commercial cores of other New Urban subdivisions have sputtered financially, if they've been built at all. Traditionally, suburban retailers depend on big parking lots that can scoop customers off a highway. New Urban retailers must depend more on local walking traffic, which may not be enough to pay a merchant's bills.

Although homes have sold relatively well in some New Urban developments, their design also has drawbacks. Placing parking and driveways behind houses, for instance, means that residents often sacrifice their back yards for the sake of a nice-looking front door. Not everyone is pleased with this trade-off.

Most of New Urbanism's difficulties have to do with trying to squeeze design guidelines developed before cars were invented into areas built around the automobile. Cities like Virginia Beach and Chesapeake spill out from central arteries like Independence and Battlefield boulevards. Trying to revive 19th century design standards in such an environment may be impossible.

But even if flawed, New Urbanism and Warrington Hall still could succeed as an improved form of suburbia, a hybrid that offers at least a refreshing change of style and look.

Leave aside the theory for a minute. As you look at the graceful curve of the traffic circle of Warrington Hall, and the landscaped mall at the neighborhood's center, you see a development designed with real care. And care almost always makes the difference between a place worth forgetting or remembering.

It's notable that Warrington Hall is being built here at all. New Urbanist suburbs have mostly appeared in more upscale and larger metropolitan areas, where sprawl is worse and tastes are more sophisticated. It's remarkable to hear the protests over Warrington Hall's townhouses. In Kentlands, a new Urban development outside Washington, D.C., the cheapest townhouses sell for close to $250,000, about what the largest homes would sell for in Warrington Hall. The single-family homes in Kentlands sell for up to $1 million.

As it is, Williamson is taking a risk, because the plazas and extensive street systems of the project are more expensive than the standard subdivision layout, Porterfield says.

The bottom line: Warrington Hall probably does not offer either its inhabitants or the area an escape from the drawbacks and dilemmas of sprawl. That problem is too big to be solved by redesigning a subdivision.

But with its attention to detail, Warrington Hall may offer home buyers a better place to live and its neighbors a nice place to drive through on a Sunday afternoon. And that is something. ILLUSTRATION: CONCEPTUAL DRAWING BY PRESTON RICHARDSON

Commercial building with retail on ground floor and offices above

facing on Warrington Sqare, the neighborhood green.

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