Design

Finding the Untapped Potential of Alleys

“We’re starting to realize they’re just as powerful as a park or plaza.”
Green Garage Detroit/Midtown Detroit Inc./Madison McVeigh/CityLab

In the early aughts, a former skateboard kid named Daniel Toole was chafing at his slick corporate job in Seattle. To feel more like his rulebreaking teenage self, he cut through back alleys on his way to work. He liked their grittiness and started taking pictures. Sometimes people threatened to kick Toole’s ass, which he handled just fine until three of those people were FBI agents. Turned out he’d photographed the security cameras on their building. They wiped the camera’s memory and warned him never to come back.

It’s a scene that’s just shady enough for its setting, but it made Toole wonder: Do alleys have to be such unwelcoming spaces? Today, Toole, 33, is the architect behind Jade and Steel Alleys, an expansive new project in the ultra-luxe Miami Design District. A recent graduate of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, he’s imagined spaces in the Design District alongside projects by world-renowned architects including Buckminster Fuller, Sou Fujimoto, and Patricia Urquiola.