Loosing Sidewalks

It’s a warm summer day in Watervliet. My mother pushes my sister in the carriage with one hand and holds my jacket hood with the other. Although I’m only six, my mother knows that as soon as I see Harrison’s Dry Cleaner I’ll take off and run down the sidewalk. We walk up 6th Avenue and turn right onto 19th Street. My mother’s grip loosens now that we’re on the same block as my grandparents’ dry cleaning business. As we pass the pharmacy, I remind my mother that she promised to buy me a fudge-sickle as soon as we got to Nudding’s—the corner store on 19th Street. As the fudge-sickle drips over my hand, I run into the Dry Cleaners and surprise my grandmother and Aunt El who are working at the counter. I stay long enough until my mother catches up then I run to the back of the cleaners to see my grandfather and Uncle Tom. It’s amazing how sometimes you can remember every crack in the sidewalk.
Watervliet New York is a small arsenal town in Upstate New York and is where I grew up. It was a town where your last name meant everything; but because my father was not originally from Watervliet, I often had to give my mothers maiden name in order to avoid the puzzled look of non-familiarity. Watervliet was a place were kids came home when the street lights turned on; a place where your mother would call you for dinner from the backdoor; and a place where every piece of the sidewalk was full of memories. As a young child, the sidewalk was my playground. I learned how to walk, run, ride my Big-Wheels, and eventually learned how to ride a bicycle on the same stretch of worn-down, cracked, and beaten-up pieces of cement squares. More than likely, my DNA can still be found on every crack and crevice from the countless spills of my youth. The sidewalk was a safe place, where my parents knew that someone would be looking out for me. Everyone on the block knew me; they knew how accident prone and hyperactive I was; they knew I was allergic to bees and even knew the subtle differences in my voice if I was in trouble. Then when I was 14, my parents moved to North Greenbush, or as my friends called it: “the boonies.”
Living in a rural area without sidewalks, I never seemed to miss the sidewalks of Watervliet. When my parents moved, they gained space, peace and quite, and more importantly to them, they gained privacy: No more door-to-door salesmen, nosy neighbors, Mrs. Penny-Feather calling because she doesn’t want me playing on her stoop or Mrs. Palmer calling to have me go to the store for her. But there was something different about our new home without a sidewalk.
I know I’ve heard this saying many times: “Sidewalks have a life of their own.” There is something about sidewalks that has an energy force, a certain vibration or rhythm. But like a certain genre of music, there are people who love it, people who hate it, and people who don’t really know what it is. Then there are people like me who are all of the above; I love it, hate it, and still don’t know what it is. Jane Jacobs is another person who seems to have a love-hate relationship with city sidewalks. Even after reading about sidewalks in her book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” I felt as though Jacobs could have written an entire book on the stories about and relationships with sidewalks, and still not completely understand what sidewalks represent.
Jane Jacobs would be very frustrated with my parents if she were to discuss the positive aspects of sidewalks in urban neighborhoods because they wouldn’t get it. Jacobs presents an almost “Leave it to beaver” setting on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where you could leave a key to your apartment with Joe Cornacchia, “who keeps the delicatessen” (78). Jacobs further explains that she’d leave the key with the store keeper “because we trust him” (78). Of course my parents would be quick to say “you don’t trust Joe, you just know that he doesn’t have your actual address, therefore the key is useless to him.” Then my parents would notice the year that Jacobs wrote about her neighborhood and would say that times have changed because people have changed. Although Jacobs made a great argument for sidewalk interactions, there must be a reason why people left this style of cohabitating and chose an alternative style. In order to understand why development shifted from neighborhoods with sidewalks to suburbs without them, we need to see what changed in America. This is where Jacobs might need a little help in showing her point of view about sidewalks and understanding what happened to sidewalks.
Jacobs could not deny that city sidewalks were not always as idyllic as her neighborhood in the 60’s. There were reasons why people left their neighborhoods in the city for a house in the country. In James Howard Kunstler’s book entitled “The Geography of Nowhere: The rise and decline of America’s man-made landscapes,” he shows that the decline in sidewalks began after World War II. The economy was booming and the focus of the nation shifted from war to “American consumerism” (77). Jacobs’ endearing view of city sidewalks was absent in the futuristic vision of modern living. As industry and technology exploded, overcrowded cities became the “industrial slums” for factory workers (60). The exciting new devices of modernism promised to free the “working slave” by improving his life. But the free industry workers needed a better place to live, while still working in the city; therefore a new design was needed to enable city workers to live outside of the city. And so the search began for an affordable way to commute.
One of the most popular inventions to improve the standard of living was the affordable automobile. Although Henry Ford did not invent the car, he was able to cheaply produce motorcars for the general population, not just for the wealthy elites. The U.S. government got financially involved by subsidizing auto use and improving roads. At the same time, streetcar companies received almost nothing from the government while car companies conspired to put them out of business. General Motors bought up street car line companies and removed the tracks. The working class American was encouraged to buy a car and leave the overcrowded and dirty cities and move to the country, where sidewalks were not needed. After World War II, Americans were obsessed with futuristic private transportation (the automobile) and an “old romantic idea” of bringing man closer to nature (Kunstler79). A minimalist style building called the “Bauhaus,” would sit in the middle of a park. Of course no one conceived the idea that the surrounding park would need to be paved over for a parking lot; but the buildings still remain. In the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s homes were designed to include the automobile as a member of the family, attaching a garage to the overall design of the house. Businesses, catering to car owners, became a symbol of modernization and pop-culture. Drive-in theaters and restaurants allowed you to stay in your car while the service came to you. From the end of World War II right up to today, the car represented freedom and independence; Americans freely gave up sidewalks of the city for paved streets, freeways, and superhighways of the suburbs; but as Kunstler and Jacobs point out, Americans are loosing a vehicle of human interaction.
Jacobs explains that there is a unique balance in a city between a person’s necessary privacy and his or her desire for varying levels of interaction from other people (77). But as Kunstler mentions the automobile suburbs, without sidewalks, were the “motive force” in the “elimination of the public realm” where social interactions occur (Kunstler 189).
For the most part, the public realm of suburbia is composed of streets and highways. By separating and scattering businesses that would be found within a ten-minute walk in the city, suburbanites must spend most of their time alone in their cars (Kunstler 119). The balance that Jacobs speaks about is virtually absent in the suburban setting. Kunstler points out this unbalance by describing how some shoppers in a supermarket will linger just to have some purposeful activity with other living humans (119). Social interactions that my parents complained about in Watervliet, now is strongly desired by them and many other Americans.
Social interaction, which is taken for granted on the city sidewalks, has become highly desired in the auto suburbs. One example of this hunger for the “public realm” is the popularity of malls, which commercialized on the new demand for social interactions. This public need was also capitalized by the Walt Disney Corporation. Kunstler called Disney World one of the “capitals of unreality” because of its ability to cash in on the relationships that occurred on Main Street U.S.A. (217). In Disney World, sidewalks, streets, building facades, cart venders, and even the seamlessly pressed employees are forced to come together and intermingle. There is a shared feeling of joy and anticipation as the hordes of visitors contemplate which direction should be next on the agenda. In the 1980’s the Disney Corporation decided to expand the “it’s a small world” theme to an actual living environment.
In Julia Duin’s article in the Washington Times entitled “Social Engineering is by Design in Florida town Disney Built: Community Intricately planned to spur Interaction”, she describes how Celebration, Florida is a perfect example of everything that people want but is missing in other post-World War II suburbs. The town has been compared to Levittown, Pleasantville, a Norman Rockwell painting, and a John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” (1). The Disney Corp. ensured that every detail in the planning and construction of Celebration centered on “community interaction”; there are no privacy walls or thick obtrusive shrubs; porches and sidewalks are in close proximity to encourage a sense of “togetherness” (3). But as Duin mentions in her article, there are some downsides to living in a “prepackaged” neighborhood.
Although Celebration, FL has recaptured some of the pre-World War II concepts of “neighborliness”, some residents complain about the same issues that my parents faced in Watervliet. As Jacobs mentioned, there has to be a balance between public and private life. Unfortunately in Celebration, the neighbors are always “in your Hair” (Jacobs 73). There is not a subtle assumption of neighborly support; it is blatant, demanded, and enforced. Disney actually has “porch police” to ensure that the residents of Celebration follow the guidelines of their contract; they must have the correct window treatments, hedges can not be taller than 42 inches, and landscaping must allow passersby to see in. After reading Duin’s article I felt like Walt Disney took Jacobs’ and Kunstler’s predilections to the extreme. But Celebration is not the only example of an extreme form of community.
There seems to be a growing trend in America to create that feeling of togetherness found on many urban neighborhood sidewalks; however, there is also a growing fear of public safety. One possible solution has been “gated communities.” As Dell Champlin explains in her article in the Journal of Economic Issues entitled “The Privatization of community: Implications for Urban Policy”, “privatized neighborhoods try to enhance individual social involvement while also providing additional public safety (1). But like so many other “projects,” there is always a price to be paid for any reward. There is a great debate on the benefits and short-comings of Privatization; but no one would argue that “gated communities” are the responses to the need for safe social contact. This desire to interact with others brings me back to my parents in Upstate New York.
My parents would never consider taking a walk or a bike ride on their street. If you asked them to describe their neighbors in any way, they would only be able to mention the next door neighbor on the right side of their property. They have never met the family living on the left side of their property even though that family moved in around seven years ago. And the neighbors across the street, “well they’re just weird.” There seems to be an unwritten suburban rule: “We don’t bother them, they don’t bother us; we like everyone to keep to themselves.” Sidewalks (or the lack there of) seems to support this unwritten rule. It’s easy to keep to yourselves if you do not have a way to bother your neighbors. Privacy becomes a popular side effect when a sidewalk is removed.
The issues of public vs. private do not just pertain to how we view sidewalks; instead we use sidewalks to view ourselves. Sidewalks become instrumental in establishing a quality of life.
A sidewalk can be thought of as a welcome mat, encouraging others to come and socialize with the residents. If you remove this symbol of social interaction you remove more than just concrete or slate; you restrict an innate desire to be with others as one of many. Perhaps we need to look much further than sidewalks to find an answer to our problems of anti-social forms of living; but it’s a damn good place to start.