Historical June 1999 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
It’s Monday evening, May 10th, and Crossroads School is hosting a crowd of 250-300 people on the front green space as National Public Radio’s Ray Suarez discusses his new book, The Old Neighborhood, What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966-99.
As the sun sets in the west (ok, there are some things that are better in the county), Suarez shares his memories of growing up in an urban neighborhood where everything was within walking distance.
He also points out how the ties of our society have fragmented as we have left behind that neighborhood. (If you have not seen it already, I recommend Barry Levinson’s wonderful movie Avalon, which shows how Americans fleeing to the suburbs and the intrusion of television into our living rooms changed us irrevocably.) It’s an idyllic urban evening with people sitting and standing on the grass, listening to Suarez, and feeling good about living in the city. Among the many wonderful points Suarez makes, one stands out. Suarez says that we need to get back to living in settings where everything, or almost everything in our world, is within walking distance.
When we can walk to our place of worship, our school, our library, or various shops, we develop a closer relationship with our space and the people who inhabit it.
We feel a connection to those places, and in the process, we put those locations into our concept of intimate space.
In the comedy, L.A. Story, there is a humorous scene where Steve Martin and a newcomer to LA get into his car and go to a neighbor’s home two houses away.
When the guest from the United Kingdom asks Martin why he does not walk, he guffaws and exclaims “walk, nobody walks in LA!” as if it is the most ludicrous thought in the world. Unfortunately, it’s not only in LA that the automotive mode of thinking predominates.
In St. Louis, and in other municipalities, we take the easy route of jumping into our automobile, turning on our radio and heading out. (It amuses me how Americans, who would never walk anywhere at home, go overseas and walk everywhere, and it even has a certain cachet since it’s in a foreign country.) We have become so dependent on our cars we’re like Steve Martin; the thought of walking anywhere becomes ridiculous.
However, not all of our automobile travel can be attributed to laziness.
In many new suburbs, walking takes place in the street, because there are no sidewalks. Planners create places like Ye Old Towne Estates or Condorama Complex Village based on the assumption that nobody would really want to walk when they can take the car.
These new suburban developments have the notion of car travel so deeply implanted in them that walking is nothing more than a chance to appear on the Chuck Connors’ Thrill Seekers television series.
In the process of foregoing sidewalks, the planners have also created islands of isolated individuals or families where people have little opportunity for unplanned interactions.
In her wonderful book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs explains the many ways in which sidewalks benefit us individually and communally.
In discussing the types of interactions and discussions on the sidewalk, Jacobs says Most of it is ostensibly utterly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all.
The sum of such casual, public contact at a local level-most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it meted by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone-is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need.
The absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street (56).
The sidewalk forces us to run into each other casually and have informal conversations.
In the process, lines of miscommunication fall and the strangers who live on our street become recognizable people with whom we connect. Although these individuals may not be our best friends, they are people whom we can grow to trust and whom we can view as part of our community.
To quote Jacobs again, Under this system, it is possible in a city street neighborhood to know all kinds of people without unwelcome entanglements, without boredom, necessity for excuses, explanations, fears of giving offense, embarrassments respecting impositions or commitments, and all such paraphernalia of obligations which accompany less limited relationships.
It is possible to be on excellent sidewalk terms with people who are very different from oneself, and even, as time passes, on familiar public terms with them. Such relationships can, and do, endure for many years, for decades; they could never have formed without that line, much less endured.
They form precisely because they are by-theway to people’s normal public sorties (62).
As a level of trust in our neighbors and in our neighborhood increases, the sidewalk also becomes a teaching place for children. Jacobs discusses how in a neighborhood characterized by mutual dependence, people expect each other to help socialize their children.
I hope that when our two boys act out or misbehave, other adults sitting on their front porches will let them know that they have misbehaved, and not just that that they have violated our standards but those of the entire community.
When children play on the sidewalk, as opposed to being by themselves on a playground or in a park, they do so in front of their own parents but also in full display of other adults who can monitor their behavior.
While playing on the sidewalk, children also watch and mimic how adults interact with one another. Children eventually learn how people speak to each other, how they help strangers, and how they look out for each other.
In the process, they realize that the lessons we impart to them verbally are not just manufactured rules that adults don’t really believe.
They witness and internalize forms of communal behavior that prepare them to be citizens and participants.
When sidewalk life is missing, children lack this daily example of how adults talk with people they know, and just as importantly, how they talk to strangers. Is it any wonder that teenagers with no models of adult conflict resolution resort to violence when they feel frustrated?
They live in their private castles, and they have no contact with other adults or children. One of my acquaintances once said that by living in the suburbs of St. Louis, she had relegated her children to growing up in the “prison of West County.” Although there are many reasons for the ongoing increase in school violence, we cannot ignore how our neighborhoods fail to socialize our children as one major component of this frightful trend. Our children become alienated as they fail to make connections with any community structures, such as churches, synagogues, mosques, YMCA’s, etc.
In the process, they cease to see how their interactions affect others, and they become free floating atoms with no ties to anyone or anything. Building and fixing sidewalks may not cure all of the ills of late twentieth century American society, but it may help restore a sense of community for our children and ourselves. (After all, something that has been a part of urban areas since the days of Pompeii cannot be all wrong.) Sidewalks provide the bridge between the public activity of the street and the private world of our houses, and in the process, they transform us from being individuals into members of a community.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, June 1999.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1999_06.pdf, printed page(s) 14; PDF page(s) 14.
