A marathon is among the most open and egalitarian of sporting events. It doesn't come cluttered with superstar egos or luxury suites.
For spectators, it's free. And the best place to watch it is from the sidewalk.
In any big city, a marathon is also a giant, snaking architectural tour, a human millipede linking one block to the next.
For all those reasons, Monday's bomb blasts near the finish line of the Boston Marathon were an attack on public space and what we think of, perhaps too grandly, as the ideals of cosmopolitanism and urban life.
FULL COVERAGE: Boston Marathon explosions
In the short term, the major effect will likely be on security — and on our collective anxiety.
The bombings will be on the minds of runners in Sunday's London Marathon and next year's race in Boston. In Los Angeles, security has already been tightened at Dodger Stadium, and may be beefed up for Sunday's CicLAvia, which will close a long stretch of Venice Boulevard among other streets to car traffic.
But terrorism of this kind also presents longer-term implications for how our cities look and how we use them. Just as we are beginning to see real progress in a hard-fought battle to rebalance the design of American streets, opening up new space for pedestrians and cyclists and making them more public in a range of ways, we may be facing a period of retrenchment.
Even as we've been inspired by events in Tahrir Square and beyond, we now have reason to expect at least some efforts to close off our own streets and sidewalks.
And if new restrictions do arrive, they won't apply only to big cities. Unlike the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center towers, in which skyscraper architecture furnished both symbolic and literal target, Monday's attack was terrorism at street level.
Not every American city has skyscrapers or high-profile marathons. But every one has sidewalks, street corners and public festivals.
However understandable it seems with bloody images still filling our newspapers and computer screens, we should strongly resist the impulse to use Boston as a rationale for re-armoring our own avenues and boulevards.
GRAPHIC: Explosions on Boston Marathon route
This kind of attack is exceedingly rare in the lives of cities. The guiding principle for the design of streets should be the best daily use, not the worst-case scenario. After all, it's unlikely that any change to Boylston Street, short of police checkpoints at every intersection along the marathon route, might have prevented this attack.
In Los Angeles, particularly downtown, we know all too well the various pressures that push cities and streets from public to private, from open to closed. But the last few years have brought a welcome reversal of that trajectory.
Thanks to urban planners, architects, policymakers and organizers of events such as CicLAvia, nearly every change to L.A. streets is now made in favor of openness, public space and new kinds of mobility.
In Boston, runners in Monday's marathon reached Boylston Street by making a left turn from Hereford Street. They passed a new Apple store on the left and the Lenox Hotel on the right before approaching the finish line right in front of the Boston Public Library, an 1895 building by McKim, Mead & White, and the scalloped pink-granite arches of its 1972 addition, by Philip Johnson.
It was directly across from the Johnson wing that the first explosion occurred. The second blast was a block to the west about 10 seconds later.
The two library wings solidly anchor the south side of the street. Across from them is a collection of finely wrought masonry buildings including Old South Church. The scale is urban but not overwhelming, with buildings between about five and about 15 stories high.
This stretch of Boylston, coming just before it opens out onto Copley Square and full views of I.M. Pei's Hancock Tower and Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church, is just the sort of block architect Louis Kahn had in mind when in a 1971 lecture he defined a successful city street as "a room of agreement."
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By that he didn't mean simply that any street is the product of negotiation among its various users, whether they're on foot or in cars, and among the architects and planners who shape its edges. He was also suggesting that a well-designed street brings those competing interests into some kind of harmony.
Kahn certainly couldn't have imagined how 21st-century terrorism might affect the American city. But his discussion of the urban street wasn't divorced from conflict or even violence. Far from it.
By 1971, with protests over the Vietnam War mounting, Kahn saw the "agreement" that binds urban spaces together as threatened — noticing, as he put it in the same speech, a "mad outburst of frustration" all around him in American cities. He may have felt some sympathy with opponents of the war, but he also felt compelled to spell out the virtues of the street, to lend it some protection.
We should do the same thing now. It is at times like these that the idea of the open, urban and democratic street — slowly reemerging in Los Angeles and other cities even as it comes under attack in Boston — is more vulnerable and more valuable than ever.
christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com
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