Amelia-Lucy's blog

I never told anyone I was from Texas until I moved to New York City. During the seventeen years I lived in Texas, I told everyone I was from Maryland, which is where I was born, and lived for the first two years of my life. I was astounded at how quickly I returned to my Southern “roots” when I finally moved away from my small East Texas town of Commerce. Somehow, all those years of wishing I was living somewhere else vanished in the first few days of living here. One would think that this fast return to allegiance for my childhood home might teach me something about being more grateful and loyal to the place where I grew up. But it didn’t. When I go back to Texas now, I always make a point to tell people I live in New York.

In many ways, the study of sense of place fascinates me because of this very paradox. I was raised in the most conservative, religious stretch of East Texas by northeastern natives who often vote for Ralph Nader (because voting for the democrat in Texas is a losing battle, and they figure we may as well give Ralph some votes) and very rarely go to church. In other words, I was raised by outsiders to be an outsider. I was specifically told never to say “ya’ll” or “ain’t,” and would be reprimanded if my parents detected any kind of twang. I was raised vegetarian in a county whose official food, if there was such a thing, would be brisket. And I was raised with the constant notion floating about my household that this place—with its fire ants, annual three-month drought, and 110-degree summers—was merely a temporary resting point before we all made our way back to the northeast.

Moving to New York was hardly a decision for me. After growing up with the constant notion of leaving, the only thing that seemed strange was when people asked if I would stay in Texas. Would I stay in Texas?! Of course not. The northeast, on the other hand, shone like some beacon of a promised land, the place where “my people” were, the place I would finally find a sense of place that made me feel at home.

That’s not really what happened when I moved to New York during the spring of my sophomore year of college. Sure, there are parts of New York that make me feel very welcome, a part of the city. I love Brooklyn, and the way so many neighborhoods are sprouting arts festivals, craft fairs—even writing workshops. I love walking around the West Village imagining Jack Kerouac planting his feet along the same worn streets I travel on. I even love going to midtown and imagining F. Scott Fitzgerald carousing through the nights with his crazy wife. But I am not a New Yorker—I’m still a visitor. There is nothing about the environment of New York—its subways, its grid, its constant movement—that really feels natural to me. It is not the home I was so long searching for in Texas.

But it is a home for me. Just like Texas is a home. Neither place ever felt like the quintessential idea of home to me, a place where I felt comfortable with everything. So I started wondering about what the sense of place was in each of them that made me feel some connection. For New York, I think it’s the history and the identity of the city that I relate to. A place is full of what happened in it before, and New York is always full of all the fascinating and wonderful things that happened before I moved here. For Texas, it is the environment more than the people that make me feel at home. The heat, the red dirt, the cicadas, the bats—all of these elements create the ideal home environment for me.

I think that many people probably feel conflicted about their home in some way, and it is that fascinating transition from one place to another that allows us to decipher the elements of a certain city or state that made it our home. A sense of place is not objective in memory—it is idealistic, sentimental, the best parts of something that we end up remembering. But maybe this remembered sense of place is the most real—it’s the sense of place that made us feel, at least a little bit, that we had made it home. 

View my slideshow for more pictures of the Jalopy Theatre.

I am sitting on a wooden bench in the Jalopy Theatre and School of Music in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and I am listening to a man with a guitar sing a Johnny Cash song. He’s pretty good, and he’s only a student—the student of the man playing guitar next to him, who is Michael Daves, a bluegrass musician who can be found on any given Tuesday night at the Rockwood Music Hall in the Lower East Side. Rumor has it that Daves is currently teaching Peter Sarsgaard how to become bluegrass legend Bill Monroe for a movie that may or may not be coming out soon. But none of this really matters in the Jalopy Theatre, which is sitting on this particular day with its doors open and its cappuccino machine buzzing happily. The Jalopy Theatre does not much care about fame, or appearance, or even convenient locations (it’s fairly difficult to get here without driving in a car). In a time when plenty of world-class music venues are located in bustling Manhattan, mere steps from a popular train station, the Jalopy Theatre almost seems not to care very much about New York City—it simply does its own thing.  

Jalopy arrived in 2006, the brainchild of Geoff and Lynette Wiley of Chicago, Illinois, who got married beneath its ornate ceilings. They live upstairs and run Jalopy as a “community arts space,” according to this New York Post article--a gathering spot for artists, musicians, listeners, and teachers who want to come together for the pure joy of creating something interesting, old-fashioned, and unique. The walls are covered with art, guitars, mandolins, and all other manner of folk memorabilia. CDs of bands that frequent Jalopy lie around on the counters amongst fliers and brochures for folk concerts and events. A bar on the right-hand side serves tea and coffee in mugs that look like something a grandmother might own—brightly colored, hand-painted, full of flowers and cats. The floor is wooden and a little ragged; lived in and appreciated, it has its fair share of creaks and moans.  For all the space’s lack of pretention, the most pretentious thing about Jalopy may be the very place it rests—on 315 Columbia Street, eight blocks from the nearest subway stop, in a cozy corner of the BQE and Gowanus Expressway, directly across from the entrance to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. The Jalopy Theatre Facebook page even has an instructional video posted about how to get to the theatre. In a trailer for a documentary about Jalopy posted on its website, the bearded co-founder Geoff Wiley says, “You have to be interested to get to Jalopy, because it’s not exactly in the way. You can’t just stumble over it. I meant that very purposely to be a little outside of things—so you have to try to get here.”

In a city where thousands of struggling artists, musicians, and entrepreneurs are constantly trying to “make it”—to create some profitable business or artistic community without being eaten up by the overwhelming expense and gentrification of artsy lower Manhattan, or even Williamsburg and Park Slope, a statement like that seems to have a lot of gall. The first time I learned that Jalopy’s location was purposeful and not some cruel joke New York City played on unwitting out-of-towners looking to buy a building to buy, I thought, Who do these people think they are? Since when can you set up a music venue in the middle of nowhere South Brooklyn and expect it to flourish? But the truth is that the Jalopy owners had a plan all along, I believe.

In the same documentary trailer, Wiley proclaims, “There’s a purity—a true humanness to folk music that music that is produced in the modern world does not have. It’s a lot of why I’m doing this, is to try to keep a sweet place that’s sort of formal, and hold on to how people had done things in the past.”  I think what Wiley is describing here is the same essence of “authenticity” that people like Jane Jacobs or Michael Sorkin have spent quite a bit of time trying to find and preserve in New York City. In a city so sought-after, so pursued by tourists and ambitious college grads, artists and businessmen, it’s no surprise that sometimes the authenticity of it can seem to fade—evaporate in the crowds of shoppers clogging West Broadway or the close-knit flocks of movie crews parading around the West Village with their floodlights and buffet tables.  When everyone wants a piece of some pre-imagined authentic New York, where does the real New York—that lives up to its own expectations, and not tourists’—go to hide?

More and more it seems like Brooklyn is the answer to that question. It boasts an impressive burgeoning arts community, and the patterns of gentrification seen in Soho and the East Village are already creeping into the real estate and retail development of Williamsburg and Bushwick, which appears to be one of the most important indications that this is the next big thing. When Wiley defines the “purity” of folk music he hopes to preserve in the arts scene by creating Jalopy, I think he is also defining the purity of space he wants to keep for his theater. Sitting on an old wooden schoolhouse chair or rocky wooden pew in the main part of Jalopy’s performance area, I notice the yellow-white string of bulbs that line the deep magenta curtains of the stage. My notebook and camera are lit mostly by the filtering of warm and simple natural light that falls from a skylight in the middle of the room. A tiny metal fan sits in the corner of the stage, ready for the warmer months to come, when it will probably contribute very little to actually cooling the room. A classical-looking bust surveys the audience with a glaring expression, and in the corner of the stage instruments are literally piled on top of each other, a cello adorning a dusty upright piano.

This is a very accurate picture of a certain kind of authentic New York. It is both pure and human, somewhat dirty, a little grimy, but very loveable. There are hints of the carnivalesque in the bright stage curtains, marquee-like lights, wooden seating, and garish decorative statues. These hints trace back to the theatre’s early days, when circus freak shows were held in between the roots music and folk nights. Jalopy now hosts mainly folk musicians and old-timey Americana bands, but this music scene is still a big part of an authentic New York that has recently been revived. All manner of publications—from the Village Voice to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post—have mentioned Jalopy in conjunction with a bluegrass/folk craze that has swept the city in recent years. In 2008, the New York Times published an article titled “The Sound is Rural, the Setting Urban” which claimed, “New York has lately become remarkably hospitable to musicians upholding more rustic ideals. Of course there’s a precedent for this sort of thing, stretching back at least as far as the Greenwich Village folk revival of some 50 years ago.”

The folk movement is something associated with New York at its most authentic time—the age of Jacobs herself, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, beatniks and poets. Now it is being rediscovered across the Lower East Side, in venues like the National Underground, Banjo Jim’s, and Rockwood Music Hall. Red Hook boasts another favorite bluegrass hang in Sunny’s, the place that New York Magazine’s Nightlife guide calls “‘the bar’ in Red Hook,” a place that used to be a “longshoremen’s hangout.” Besides its folk affiliations, the South Brooklyn neighborhood has a distinctly New York legacy of its own—it’s the birthplace of the famous New York gangster Crazy Joe Gallo, and was the setting of an H. P. Lovecraft short story called “The Horror at Red Hook,” a scary tale of hellish adventures in Brooklyn.

Amongst all this history and artistry sits Jalopy, far away from anything else but still very close to the heart of New York City. The unique purpose of the theatre—to allow artists to both perform and learn from each other—speaks to an essential New York, the core of what makes it one of the most thriving artistic communities in the world. The theatre’s gentle shabbiness, welcoming crowds, and wholly American feel make it even more accessible and local. But the true secret of Jalopy and its magical quality may just be its incredibly inconvenient location. The Wiley’s choice in placing their theatre far away from anything else appeals to an image of New York we all love, and love to hate—the brash, headstrong quality that gives the city its gruff, arrogant, and ultimately loveable persona. By keeping Jalopy tucked away from the rest of the city, it achieves a sense of place that gives it the authenticity that so many venues in New York strive to find with no luck. And even as threats of gentrification creep into neighborhoods as far south as Red Hook, I’m confident that the Jalopy philosophy of place will help it maintain its authentic New York identity. 

All pictures were taken by me.

Michael Sorkin’s discussion of the gentrification of Soho made me reconsider my views once again on the gentrification of my own neighborhood in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I found several similarities between the characteristics of Soho in the sixties and Bushwick today—for one thing, both are neighborhoods defined by an abundance of artistic activity, and both contain abandoned loft building as a primary form of dwelling for residents. However, the similarities don’t end there. As Sorkin wrestled with the possible benefits and downsides of a gentrified Soho, I found myself reexamining the ways in which Bushwick’s gentrification may, in fact, be a destined occurrence.

As Sorkin lays out the evolution, benefits, and problems of Soho’s gentrification since the 1960s, he highlights the fact that the process all began because “of a very specific kind of architecture: the cast-iron factory” (147). The factory buildings in Bushwick aren’t cast-iron (as far as I can tell), but they have many similar qualities. From Sorkin’s descriptions I was able to see that the recently abandoned factory buildings that now house most of the new population of Bushwick are quite similar to Soho’s lofts, and are desired for the same reasons: they are huge, long spaces easily made into studios, and represent “highly ‘flexible’ architecture” (148). Seriously, I have seen these building transformed a million different ways on the inside, all according to the needs of their dwellers. Several of my Bushwick friends have moved into apartments that literally have no walls, and the landlords asked them to design the inside themselves. The new population of Bushwick is primarily young, unmarried, artistically minded people who have come to New York to break into some creative scene—and opportunities to create one’s own home/studio space are too great for them to ignore.

However, as I was considering how similar the early populations of Bushwick and Soho are, I realized that the populations of the loft buildings in Bushwick have a few characteristics that Sorkin doesn’t mention as much in his descriptions of the Soho lofts. For one thing, I'm comparing the pre-gentrification population of Soho (the artists) to the new artistic population of Bushwick that is the gentrifying agent (changing the old Bushwick populated mostly by Puerto Rican and Dominican families). So there are some differences in stages of gentrification in my comparison, but I think it's still fairly relevant. Secondly, even though most of Bushwick’s new population is comprised of artistic types, if I had to pick one defining characteristic of this group, I would say that they are young professionals seeking the cheapest place to live. I have a friend who once paid something like $100 per month to “live” (or rather, sleep) in a crawlspace in the somewhat-well-known McKibbin Lofts. People who live in Bushwick like the lofts for this reason—you can divide them up as small as you want to, and since the rent is already pretty cheap, you can make it really cheap. Most of the newer population that lives in Bushwick is comprised of people who didn’t go to college or grow up in New York, but who are trying post-education to break into one of the major industries the city is famous for. The fact that the lofts make for a nice studio space is a side benefit, but the rent is the most important thing.

Once I had established that difference between Bushwick and Soho, I considered Sorkin’s discussions of the problems of gentrification. I, too, have thought long and hard about “who is displaced, who is left out of the mix” in Bushwick’s transformation (143). But I have to say that Sorkin’s warning descriptions of gentrification as a kind of “monument to the Orientalist recirculation of Occidentalist values” did not ring true here (143). I started examining the gentrification issue in Bushwick about a year ago, and have since interviewed several people to gain a variety of opinions (one of them was Adam Schwartz, a high school teacher who coordinates the website upfromflames.com, and has done several interesting exhibits on Bushwick, if that interests you). The one thing they’ve all said to me—strangely—is that gentrification is not a good word to use in these circumstances. Especially in the case of Bushwick, gentrification is the wrong descriptor; the old population simply moved out, they say. That just happens sometimes. It doesn’t have to be some big tragedy. It just happens.

I had a hard time accepting this—mostly because some of the older population of Bushwick that moved here in the 1970s—still lives here, and there’s a pretty strong divide between the old and new populations. Like Sorkin says, “a boom is not always a sign of health,” and simply from going into stores and restaurants that cater to the new or old populations, anyone can see that those catering to the new populations are more expensive. From these facts, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that Bushwick is simply pushing poorer people out, becoming homogenous, losing diversity—everything Sorkin describes as the evils of gentrification.

However, at the end of this chapter, Sorkin brings us back to the idea that it was the loft—this particular space—that made the artists move into Soho in the first place. A lot of Bushwick’s older housing was burned down in the 1970s, and a lot of it still standing today is run-down or infested with bed bugs, which are a huge problem in Bushwick. Ultimately, most of the buildings aren’t really that nice to live in—until they’re renovated in a style that appeals to young, single professionals. So maybe it is the natural course for Bushwick to become "gentrified," since the older population—mainly working-class families—have moved to places that simply have dwellings that suit their needs more. Maybe, unlike Soho, it's just a phenomenon of housing, not commercial and "lifestyle tourism" takeover. Maybe. As an NYU professor in the graduate urban studies program told me last year, it’s really too hard to track why populations leave an area sometimes. But I have to say that I’m still not sure if gentrification in Bushwick is all good. 

In his discussions of the politics of “The Block” and Washington Square Park, Michael Sorkin investigates interesting ideas about ownership of public space, and who has the right to take over this space. He begins the discussion by noting, “In a city organized in grid form, the block becomes a crucial increment of both the physical and the political and social order” (Sorkin, 91). As his argument travels from the participatory democracy and the power of the block party to his personal feelings of bitterness about having Washington Square Park invaded by movie stars, I found myself questioning how New York’s public space interacts with the larger community of tourists and industries it attracts.

Is Sorkin right to criticize the films that take his neighborhood as simply a convenient “backdrop…so picturesque and so filled with signifiers of ‘New York’” (Sorkin, 100)? Is part of the “localized identity” so crucial in maintaining this democratic neighborhood power destroyed when places like Washington Square Park become commercialized? Or is public space just that: public space, up for grabs for anyone who happens to walk by?

At least part of the answers to these questions seems to come from the line, “local resistance is the citizen’s last defense against the big processes that shape our everyday lives” (Sorkin, 92). Neighborhood coalitions, organizations, and even block parties can become a symbolic way for local residents to assert their power over the broader forces acting on New York City. Sorkin emphasizes how the unusual characteristics of the block party in particular—mainly that people overtake surfaces usually designated for cars only—helps the residents of a city reclaim their ultimate power over the places they live and work in every day.

I used to live next to a block in the heart of Bushwick that had the hugest, most enthusiastic block parties I have ever seen. The block was on Bleecker Street between Central and Wilson Avenues, and I lived right across Wilson Avenue. These parties would happen every few weeks or so during the summer—road blocks (my roommates and I were pretty sure these were stolen) went up on either end, and everyone in the apartments lining each side spent the day in lawn chairs, grilling, and playing football in the street. The fire hydrants were opened and all the kids played in them; sometimes fireworks were set off at night. The parties were obviously the result of the block’s organization, since there were not commercialized at all. And although I’m pretty sure a lot of things about them were illegal, the police station a block away never did anything to stop the residents.

Most of the buildings on that block were part of the Hope Gardens Housing Project. We’ve already discussed some of the ways in which government housing in New York can totally disrupt people’s lives, and Bushwick’s projects certainly have a history that attests to this. Certainly, all of us deal with the broader forces of governement and regulation that act on our lives daily—but especially in Bushwick, or in Sorkin’s neighborhood, the forces of gentrification or reckless New York housing relocation play a big role in shaping residents’ lives. Ultimately, I think Sorkin is at least somewhat justified in ranting against Robert Duvall, Tea Leone, and Morgan Freeman overtaking Washington Square Park. If the disruption of public space is caused by the very broader forces of daily life that the disruption is supposed to counterbalance, then what is a resident left with? If Washington Square Park is so commercialized that everyone who sees it identifies it as classic New York, and therefore feels they have the right to use the space in all the ways a resident would, what is left for Sorkin?

However, as an outsider—a non-native New Yorker—who feels that Washington Square Park is my own, in some small way, I also heartily disagree with Sorkin’s rant. Part of the essence of New York is the fact that everyone knows about it. So if that means that sometime a movie closes off Washington Square Park—I think that’s just what comes with such a dearly loved space.

While reading Anthony Flint’s Wrestling with Moses, I was struck by the ways in which both sides of the battle—Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses—come off at different times in the book as extremely intelligent, keen observers of urban life, who both offer excellent contributions to New York City. Although of course I’m having that Washington Square Park is still with us, I was amazed by the fact that some of Moses’s fervently protested building plans are some of my favorite places in the city. Though I was expecting to stand firm by Jacobs through the whole story, I found myself very torn between these two perspectives on urban renewal.

Though Moses is often portrayed throughout the book as a somewhat power-crazed, hoity-toity developer who generally seems to consider public dissent completely useless and only vaguely annoying, his headstrong, monolithic personality undoubtedly allowed him to construct some amazing features of New York. I was most surprised to learn about the dissent surrounding Lincoln Center. I had no idea the construction of Lincoln Center forced so many blocks of housing to be razed, and had I been alive when such development was taking place, I have a feeling that I, too, would have protested this plan. Yet Moses left the city an amazing performing arts complex—a beautiful construction in which New York still thrives as a leading center of art, culture, and music. I feel like, in this case, Moses was able to have more foresight about the overall benefit Lincoln Center would have on the city—the way it would continue to help the arts grow for generations. And it seems he had an excellent handle on how to effectively funnel federal money into New York, which certainly benefited the city. At one point Flint describes his perspective on the Triborough Bridge, claiming he say it as an “artery” (Flint, 32). I think this best embodies Moses’s perception of the city—to him, it was a living, breathing organism, and he was some kind of master surgeon, dedicated to cutting it up and transplanting things to help it function as a whole.

However, though Lincoln Center makes Moses appear to be a man with a proper amount of foresight and ability to correctly foresee the future of a city, his disinterest in public transportation and his focus on the car seems completely absurd. Certainly, after reading and meeting Kunstler, we all understand how America’s car culture has got to go. But even in Moses’s time, when global warming hadn’t emerged, and the car was still exciting and new, it seems to me that the mechanics of having a city as large as New York run on cars should be seen as obviously very flawed. The numbers just don’t add up—why would you work to improve a system as inefficient as roadways when the subway system could be improved? I was reminded a little bit of Waldie when pondering this aspect of Moses’s plan. Perhaps Moses simply wanted to usher New York into America’s Golden Age, cars and all—maybe this was just his perception of the American Dream for urban living.

Jacobs’s approach to understanding a city really appeals to me. I enjoyed reading about her beginnings in New York—how she started learning about the neighborhoods by understanding their economies first. We revisited the idea that a flourishing local economy can really help create a good sense of place several times throughout the semester (also thanks to Kunstler), and I think Jacobs’s way of understanding a neighborhood or a city by understanding how the flower market functions is genius. The things she focused on during her time writing for Vogue—manhole covers, fur districts, and flower markets—really showcase how she has the ability to do the opposite of what Moses does. Jacobs manages to take a local function or quirk and relate it to how the city functions as a whole, while Moses seems more concerned with looking at how the city functions as a whole and introducing something new to make it function better. I think it’s unfair to say that Moses doesn’t value the local, or the arenas in which people make relationships and mingle—after all, he did help to build a lot of parks, which are crucial in maintaining neighborhood relations. It almost seems like Moses saw New York City as a neighborhood, and could not distinguish between its several different parts. Jacobs was able to see the diversity of the city and understand how it functioned together.

Both views regarding urban renewal have their pros and cons. There were points in this book where I really couldn’t decide who I agreed with more—and then I remembered that Moses wanted to destroy Washington Square Park, and so of course I fell back on Jacobs’s side. Ultimately, I think I feel that both viewpoints are lacking. The truth is that some places in a city can become very run down and genuinely need repair and money funneled to those areas. Moses was good at getting money; Jacobs was good at understanding how important it was to preserve what was already there, and not simply destroying a neighborhood with the excuse of urban renewal. If only there was a Jacobs-Moses hybrid.

On a slightly different note, I found a Google Books result that gave me the lyrics to the Cole Porter song “Washington Square” that Flint mentioned. I think my favorite lines are the last ones: “Though the food may be erratic, dear/We’ll be democratic, dear/When we settle in our attic, dear/In Washington Square.”

At the beginning of Michael Pollan’s chapter “Windows,” the author/builder seems dead set on the idea that Charlie’s “Eight-One” architectural plans are wasteful and unnecessary. He is open to Charlie’s side of the story, but as he presented the story of the “Eight-Oh” house, even I wondered what the big deal is about one little inch. If building a house with eight foot walls would mean that waste of wood would go down significantly, why wouldn’t everyone just throw out the last inch? Are Eight-One type architectural styles simply an indication of typical American wastefulness? I have to admit that at the beginning of this chapter, I was feeling pretty negatively towards Charlie and his hoity-toity ideas about how to make a house.

I think Michael Pollan was probably feeling similar things at this stage. The sheer practicality of the Eight-Oh house—though Charlie notes that it was probably “’a dry box’”—seems, as Pollan notes “at least partly sane” in the wake of Le Corbusier’s idea that “originality, if not eccentricity, was an end in itself” (Pollan, 229, 230). Pollan seems frustrated here that realistic building and carpentry plans are not an end in itself. But this chapter fascinated me because of the broad range of styles and techniques that ultimately go into making these windows. As Pollan faces facts that his in-swinging casement window is doomed to leak, he muses, “Really, how brilliant was any architectural idea that so blithely defied the facts, the exigencies of construction and weather, which is to say the world we live in” (Pollan, 236). It is impossible to ignore the fact that housing needs to actually house people effectively (at least for Pollan and myself). Yet by the end of the chapter, when he sees the world through Charlie’s windows, he is compelled to write, “Some windows are better than others, can cast the world in a fresher light, even make it new” (Pollan, 265).

It seems that the “prescription windows” Charlie had given to Pollan allowed him see the world in what might be called the “right way” to see it from the writing house. My conclusion is based on the assumption that indeed some places have some kind of “soul”—that there is a right and wrong way to view the world from a particular dwelling. But I am drawn to believe this idea simply because of how collaborative Pollan’s windows are—they really seem to take techniques and inspiration from both sides of the modernist architecture battle. Pollan writes, “Here in microcosm was that collaboration, between the postmodern temper and the craftsman ideal” (Pollan, 245). These windows were a process of evolution—they embody the methods and minds of so many different perspectives on architecture that it seems that they must truly be the right “prescription windows.”

By the end of this chapter I could see that building a whole bunch of Eight-Oh boxes for people to live in is probably not quite as nice an idea as forming a collaborative effort between the Arts and Crafts movement beliefs and the artistic nature of modern architecture. Reading about the Eight-Oh box reminded me a lot of Waldie’s Holy Land—I think because I imagine that Charlie would describe his house in a similarly derogatory manner. And even though I was convinced of the Eight-One theory by the end of this chapter, I wonder if mass-produced houses like Waldie’s still have a place. If the soul of Pollan’s writing house required this architecture, is it possible that the soul of an isolated bean field might require the construction of a planned community? Is any place every suitable for a planned community? And if the answer is no, how are people like the residents in the Levittown video so happy in their homes? 

1. There are two neighborhoods in Commerce, Texas. The one to the east of Culver Street is called the Teacher’s Ghetto. The one to the left is called The Hole. I grew up in the Teacher’s Ghetto.
 
2. When I was in high school, my friends and I used to drive around The Hole looking for houses with the windows covered in aluminum foil. These were the houses where people were cooking meth. We used to slow the car down and push someone out and lock the car doors as a joke. Most of us had lived in The Hole at some point, but we all thought it was very funny and very scary. I had never lived in The Hole. The Teacher’s Ghetto was for people who worked in the school system or the university. I had lived there since I was two.

3. My mother cried every day for two months when we moved to Commerce. We lived in a duplex on the outskirts of town. One day she woke up and there was a cow in the front yard. When I was four, she took me and my best friend on a walk past a cow pasture, and taught us to say “Mooo” at the cows. We were charged by a bull and had to run into a small stream to get away.

When the town started developing houses around the old duplex—on a street that came to be known as Tiffany Lane several years later—my mother was very sorry to see the Indian Paintbrushes and Queen Anne’s Lace demolished. We picked several bouquets of bluebonnets, although it was illegal.

4. In 1864, the town was still called Cow Hill. It was the St. Louis Southwestern Railroad and the branch of Texas A&M University that made it grow to 8,000. There are few trains that run through Commerce now. But there are an inordinate amount of stray cats left by students who graduate or go home for breaks. Most of them live on campus. The Humane Society is very concerned.

5. In 2007, Billy Bob Thornton was spotted in the Wal-Mart on Highway 50, just inside the city limits. He was wearing a yellow raincoat. He bought a Sprite; everyone knew about it within fifteen minutes.

6. When I was ten I had to take a note home to my parents informing them of a strep throat epidemic. I was instructed to alert someone the minute I felt tired, feverish, or pain in my throat.

The week before a six-year-old had died.

7. The public high school is a frequent receiver of bomb threats. The administration is aware that the threats are always called in by the Quinlan Football Team in the fall, before the Commerce/Quinlan football game. The information does not stop them from setting off the fire alarm and ushering the entire school into the football field to wait for the bomb-sniffing dogs. Once they waited for three hours in the rain in October.

Quinlan and Commerce have both been named, at different times, the meth capital of the world and the teenage pregnancy capital of the United States. It is most likely that both of these titles are innacurate descriptions of either town, although it is true that they are football rivals.

8. In March of 2010 an armed man walked into the Wal-Mart on Highway 50 that Billy Bob Thornton had visited and began firing his gun. The patrons fled the store and walked up the road to the Holiday Inn, where they were given cups of water. The armed man was shot by an off-duty police officer as he tried to leave the store. He died soon after.

9. In the summer of 2005, rumors circulated that an alligator had crawled approximately twenty-five miles from Cooper Lake to Commerce by way of an underground sewer, and was living in the duck pond. Several sightings of the beast occurred shortly thereafter.  There was general concern for the well-being of the ducks.

The following week the newspaper reported that animal control had successfully captured an animal in the duck pond. That animal was an alligator snapping turtle.

The interest in the duck pond dropped significantly.

10. The musician Ben Kweller, a native of a town about twenty minutes away from Commerce, wrote a song about Commerce called Commerce, TX. In 2008 he came back and played it for the town natives at a special concert. He forgot some of the words halfway through, and the audience had to sing it for him.
   

In north Brooklyn, Knickerbocker Avenue runs in front of the windowless, brick façade of the offices of the eighty-third police precinct, the section of the NYPD that serves the area of Bushwick, Brooklyn. The corner that holds the eighty-third precinct is relatively quiet, with a Laundromat across the street that says, in large letters printed on the glass window, “It’ll All Come Out in the Wash.” There is a clear view of the M train, rumbling over the Burger King every nine to eleven minutes, and a paved schoolyard where teenage boys often play handball. To the west, the avenue snakes under the elevated subway track and transforms into a lively thoroughfare with shops like Jimmy Jazz Urban Clothing, Rite Aid, and a lawyer’s office with a sign outside in English and Spanish that proclaims at the bottom “CALL 1-800 I CAN SUE”. The street then ambles along in front of Maria Hernandez Park, Joe’s Fish Market, and Capone Video. It runs next to the Morgan Stop on the L Train, where a mural of graffiti decorates the side of a strip of buildings that hold the Brooklyn Natural organic grocery store, a small sushi shack, and a gourmet pizza restaurant. Shortly afterwards Knickerbocker collapses into Morgan Avenue and ceases to exist.
 
This trip along Knickerbocker Avenue—approximately seventeen short blocks from the precinct offices to the Morgan L train subway stop—encapsulates an excellent picture of the diversity and changing landscape of the neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn. It’s almost like a trip through time, from the late 1970s, when Bushwick was one of the worst ghettos in America, to the present day, when an encroaching population of mostly white, young, unmarried residents is once again changing the demographic and the sense of place of Bushwick. It’s a neighborhood that is either improving greatly thanks to the glories of “urban renewal” and the artistic, young immigrating population—or a neighborhood that is quickly vanishing forever, its Italian, German, Puerto Rican, and Dominican heritage shunted aside by fancy grocery stores and renovated, expensive housing.
 
Bushwick is my home in New York City—it is the place where I live and spend most of my time. It is energizing and wonderful to live in a neighborhood full of flux, where music venues and small restaurants pop up in place of burned-out housing projects; where I can find cheap studio space or someone trying to start a band on every coffee shop’s bulletin board. But it has always been troubling, and sometimes even tragic, to recognize that everyone who used to ride the L train to Morgan Avenue or Jefferson Street is seeing the neighborhood they once called home slowly disappear—evaporate. Bushwick has been burned and looted, pushed around, destroyed, and, recently, rediscovered. It’s a neighborhood on the brink of real change, and its sense of place is greatly affected by the tension that lives in the seventeen blocks along Knickerbocker Avenue.
 
Over a century ago, Bushwick was home to a wide array of profitable industry, ranging from beer breweries to knitting and sewing factories. The neighborhood—mainly Italian—housed mostly middle and even upper class families, with bona fide mansions set back from some tree-lined streets. The economy benefited from the variety of jobs available. But in the mid-twentieth century, several neighborhoods surrounding Bushwick, like Bedford-Stuyvesant to the south, began turning into ghettos. Bushwick managed to remain untouched by the crime and poverty surrounding it for longer than any of its neighbors; similar to Kunstler’s example of Schuylerville, the neighborhood had a strong local economy, and, hence, a strong local community. Despite increasingly urgent warnings from real estate brokers that property values would soon plummet as mainly Puerto Rican and Dominican residents from housing projects in Harlem, Brownsville, and East New York were relocated to Bushwick, the Italian residents held onto their single-family homes.
 
Soon, though, Bushwick fell prey to some of the worst crime and poverty in New York City during the 1960s and 1970s. Like Schuylerville, its industries closed down—and in some cases went up in flames. Arson plagued the neighborhood as desperate residents attempted to extricate themselves from the evolving ghetto by setting fire to their own homes to get insurance claims. Kunstler mentions how “landlords get grants from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to fix up their property on the condition that they rent to people on public assistance,” and the same “mining” scheme was used by Bushwick landowners in the 1970s (Kunstler, 182). In buildings formerly full of close-knit communities, landlords worked to fill overcrowded apartments with random displaced families from other housing projects across the city. Middle class residents fled the neighborhood, taking the last amounts of local economic support with them, and Bushwick became a ghetto. Like Schuylerville, “signs of decay [were] visible everywhere” in Bushwick, and “people who live[d] [there were] losing ground steadily and drastically” (Kunstler, 184, 183). In 1969, the Catholic Church took Bushwick into its own hands and gave one final plea to the city of New York: “‘Bushwick urgently needs almost every type of community facility and service—vest-pocket housing, schools, health services, parks, supervised recreation activities, language classes, low-interest loans […] libraries, [and] more job opportunities” (Mahler, 209) But their requests were postponed and pushed aside.
 
Today, Bushwick is finally beginning to recover from the trauma of its fall in the 1970s. Bushwick Park has been renamed Maria Hernandez Park in order to erase the memories of the notorious heroin and crack deals of Bushwick Park. A 2009 New York Times article claimed that the owner of the all natural grocery store Hana Foods was “willing to pay more to lease in Bushwick than he pays for his other store,” an organic grocery store in Williamsburg. Harold Tischler, a New York real estate businessman, was quoted in a 2009 Brooklyn Ink article saying “Twenty years ago you could have been killed walking on the road [between Willoughby and Evergreen Avenues in Bushwick]. In the next ten years it will be the new Williamsburg.”
 
But Bushwick may only be getting the money it needs from companies like Hana Foods because businesses are interested in its new population—the wealthier, mainly white population that is moving to escape expensive housing in Manhattan and Williamsburg. Tuan says, “Young Americans from well-to-do families are often strong partisans of nature and of the wilderness experience…yet [they] surely also enjoy the camaraderie, the sense of group solidarity in a righteous cause, and the sheer pleasure of swimming in a sea of their own kind” (Tuan, 63). Bushwick has become the place where "young well-to-do Americans" can bond together in a kind of new bohemia—a “vernacular” of New York City. Young artists and recent college grads are quickly converting sewing factories (like the one I live in) to spacious lofts, and landlords are now forcing out the mainly native population that their predecessors forced into slums in the 1970s.
 
I think it is helpful, however, when analyzing Bushwick, to remember how Tuan referred to a neighborhood as a “concept,” and discussed how, when forming that concept, “local inhabitants have no reason to entertain concepts that are remote from their immediate needs” (Tuan, 169, 170). The truth is that the neighborhood of Bushwick contains two very different concepts of what Bushwick is—to people like me, it is a frontier, and to natives, it is a homeland. So is it possible for Bushwick to have a real community when there are two different neighborhoods within it? Is it possible to cultivate a sustainable local economy? And if not, is it inevitable that one of these neighborhoods will meet the fate of Schuylerville and many other places that lose their economy—will one of the populations of Bushwick eventually push the other out?
 
The problem with Bushwick is a problem of community. Its architecture and design is actually quite conducive to creating a good sense of place. Residents walk everywhere, and like Kunstler’s beloved Lebanon, New York it has an abundance of “mixed use” space, with apartments above the stores on Knickerbocker, wide sidewalks, and street level storefronts. Its houses usually have stoops that mirror the “capacious porches” of Lebanon, inviting conversation between sidewalk pedestrians and residents sitting on the stoops (Kunstler, 13). The shopping district on Knickerbocker contains several specialized stores, most of which are independently owned, non-corporate entities, run by locals.
 
 But Tuan also mentions how “some [slums] are so peculiar from the standpoint of the middle-class values that they become tourist attractions” (Tuan, 172). Sometimes I wonder if that’s all Bushwick has become—an entertaining exhibit for its new residents, who will force real estate prices to rise (as they already are) and replace old businesses with more expensive restaurants, grocery stores, and clothing stores that cater to a “hipster” population. When I go into the coffee shop down the street from my apartment, I see people who look almost exclusively just like me: unmarried, twentysomething, semi-artsy college grads who moved to New York but grew up somewhere completely different.  Once, before I knew the neighborhood, I went to the Puerto Rican restaurant next door to that same coffee shop with my mom for lunch. We enjoyed our food, but were eyed the entire time by the regular patrons and the staff, who only spoke Spanish—it was obvious that that venue catered to the native population of Bushwick, not the new population. About two months ago, that restaurant closed down. I always wonder now, when I walk past it, what will appear in its place, and which population will patronize it.
 
It is not true or useful to claim that the recent interest in Bushwick’s real estate has only harmed it. The truth is that even ten years ago the neighborhood had many more problems with drugs and crime than it does now. But it’s still necessary to question how much the new population of Bushwick is helping to permanently promote positive change in the neighborhood. Jackson’s discussion of the moveable home is especially helpful when thinking about how Bushwick is represented to its newer population, because in some ways Bushwick is a moveable home. Most of the younger, newer population sublets apartments, which implies a kind of impermanence and grants almost total mobility to the resident, similar to the moveable home. As Jackson says, the moveable home “has always offered, through for a brief time only, a kind of freedom we often undervalue: the freedom from burdensome emotional ties with the environment, freedom from communal responsibilities, freedom from the tyranny of the traditional home and its possissions; the freedom from belonging to a tight knit social order; and above all, the freedom to move on to somewhere else” (Jackson, 100, 101).  
 
I find it a dangerous thing to build a community on “freedom from communal responsibilities”—this implies that the many subletters of Bushwick do not feel any responsibility or attachment to the larger community, which would mean that the neighborhood could switch back to a ghetto in a few years. However, I do think the reason people move to Bushwick has a lot to do with its past, and the way it embodies a vernacular of New York. This attraction to its history infuses a deeper respect and attentiveness in its residents, both new and old. Jackson says, “The beauty that we see in the vernacular landscape is the image of our common humanity: hard work, stubborn hope, and mutual forbearance striving to be love,” and this is the same attraction Bushwick holds for an outside population (Jackson, xii). Bushwick is beautiful because it is a neighborhood encapsulation of hope and opportunity—like a burned-out forest just beginning to grow back. And this possibility, in turn, creates an even more likable environment by American standards. As Jackson notes, “We enjoy being part-time carpenter and repairman, patching up a structure we secretly know will eventually collapse or go up in flames” (Jackson, 93). The hollowed-out shells of burned warehouses become homes for the new residents of Bushwick, who are granted this ability to go DIY—to be an American on the frontier, building a ramshackle, but beloved, home.
 
As Bushwick evolves in the coming years, its sense of place will change as well. It has already undoubtedly changed for the better—the community spirit has been restored since the tragedies of the 1970s, and though its community may currently suffer from a kind of schism, the neighborhood is overall a better, safer place to live. The fact that the reason for its renewal comes from an invading population and the economic benefits they bring may not matter—perhaps Bushwick will evolve into a cohesive community, encompassing new and old populations. But it is always possible, even probable, that the newer, wealthier population will force the older, poorer population out—that Bushwick will once again transform, but will leave behind those who called it home during its darkest days. It is undoubtedly a vernacular landscape of America—a frontier of sorts, attempting to become a “better place” (in Kunstler’s words). I will be rooting for it in the years to come.    

Photo my own. The photos in the slideshow were taken by my friend Justin Camerer and myself on March 5 and 6 in Bushwick. Justin also helped with post-production photoshopping. 

Works Cited:

1.) Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. 
2.) Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. 
3.) Mahler, Jonathan. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning. New York: Picador, 2005.
4.) Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. 

 

When Kunstler described the tragic downfall of his old stomping grounds in Schuylerville, New York , I was struck by how much he connected the local economy to the declining community in the town. He talks about the evolution of the town from a farming community to an industrial factory-land—but even here, when I expected he would begin to cite the fateful mistake Schuylerville made (by industrializing), he continued to defend the town, claiming, “The money [the paper mills] earned was spent mostly in town. The factories were owned locally […] No state grants were involved and hence decisions made about public words were made locally, rather than by distant bureaucrats,” (Kunstler, 178).

The real problem in Schuylerville wasn’t industrialization, though—it was the collapse of local business. When the Boston and Maine rail service left Schuylerville, and Interstate 87 missed the town by 10 miles, traffic that kept the local stores, restaurants, and motels in business dried up, and so did the town’s economy. Kunstler describes the fate of the city as typical—the ever-encroaching “national economy” ate up any locality that once existed in the town, leaving only big business and government grants to take care of feeding and housing the residents today. Neither of these entities, according to Kunstler, cares enough to make the city hospitable. And so Schuylerville, as it once was –communal, thriving, and locally functional—has ceased to exist.

The result, says Kunstler, is a city in total disarray. “The people who live here are losing ground steadily and drastically. Their institutions have failed them,” he says (Kunstler, 183). He describes broken homes, teenage pregnancy, drug use, and other behavior he claims we only expect in “inner-city ghettos” (Kunstler, 183). As I was reading this account, it seemed like an extreme case to me. It seemed even more unlikely when I went online to read about Schuylerville today, and found their website filled with thriving local history, and an impressive list of non-Wal-Marty businesses. Granted, Kunstler hates the “Revolutionary War angle” that could make “America one big theme park,” but at least there’s more there than the locked-up shell of a chain grocery store, which is basically the picture Kunstler paints. Then I went to their school’s website, which definitely displays more community support and nurturing environments than Kunstler’s lonely prefab youth center. Finally, the website where I got my image—this blog talks about how the recent repaving of several streets in Schuylerville has really spruced everything up.

So it seems like things might be turning around these days for ol’ Schuylerville. But I still believe in the essence of what Kunstler says in this chapter, even if he did lay it on kind of thick. For one thing, the gas station in my picture is not locally owned—it’s run by the Cumberland Farms company. And Kunstler’s idea—that economy creates community, which creates a nice place to live—isn’t completely unique. I was reminded in this chapter of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, a book written in 1979 about the narcissistic mindset of Americans in the latter half of the 20th century (and how we got that way). Lasch’s book is filled with pitfalls and weird ideas, certainly, but the one thing I always agreed with whole-heartedly was his argument that the economy in America has become too specialized and too national, destroying local communities and man’s ability to perform several tasks he relies on daily (like farming, building, etc.). Most of us wouldn’t know how to grow our own food, and according to Lasch, this affects our ability to contribute in an immediate way to the community we live in—we can’t see our neighbors benefiting daily from the food we worked to grown, and therefore they become more distant to us.

But this chapter also stuck with me because it reminded of my old stomping grounds, Austin, Texas. Austin is home to the famous “Keep Austin Weird” slogan, which was developed by the Austin Independent Business Alliance in order to promote local businesses. It seems to have worked pretty well in Austin (because we really like weird stuff there) and the slogan has been used by several other cities trying to hold on to local business as well (Kunstler’s praised Portland being one of them)! So the fight to keep small business is a serious one when trying to create a real and lasting sense of place—and it shows how much an economy can change something as seemingly unchangeable as a historic town. Stay weird, ya’ll!

After reading Chapter 4 of Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere, I took a virtual trip via Internet to Llewellyn Park, the verdant, sweeping property Llewellyn Haskell built into an American dream of privacy and luxury in 1857, and, according to the website today, “The First Planned Community in America,” (LlewellynPark.com).
               
Yikes. I think the phrase “planned community” strikes terror in the hearts of most Americans these days, as we associate the faux landscape and endless rows of McMansions with the “depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading” mess of architecture that Kunstler claims has overtaken the country, especially since the Industrial Revolution (Kunstler, 10). The “coma-inducing” suburbs are killing us slowly with these Llewellyn Park-like gated communities filled with nothing more than inefficient, winding roads, artificially constructed landscapes and communities, and no place to buy basic grocery supplies. What is the point of living in a beautiful home larger than anyone would ever actually need, with a giant sprawl of yard all around it, if you can’t buy milk for your cereal on Sunday morning?

The picture I’ve included for my post is a map of the original plan for Llewellyn Park. You can see how the winding roads, picturesque street names, and cozy drawing of Haskell’s own home really do look pretty nice (go to the website for the image source, and then click on the picture to see a blown-up version). And Kunstler himself admits, “It must have been a little bit of heaven in its day,” (Kunstler, 48). Compared to the typhoid-ridden squalor and overcrowded tenement slums of the new industrial city living, I can believe this place might have seemed like a small miracle. So what is it about planned communities that really make us balk? And what kind of “sense of place” does somewhere like Llewellyn Park retain today?

Kunstler provided the answer to my first question. He concludes that places like Llewellyn Park and other early suburbs were “not properly speaking civic places […] they were real estate ventures,” (Kunstler, 51). Though the cities may have been organized to strongly around business, personal property, and commerce, as Kunstler argues in the previous chapter, the suburbs appeared to go too far in the other direction—they “lacked almost everything that a real community needs to be organically whole: productive work, markets, cultural institutions, different classes of people,” (Kunstler, 48). When you look at a suburb in that light, it seems essentially un-American—and interesting paradox, since the vision of the “American Dream,” especially after World War II, certainly involved the idea of a cozy home in a quiet neighborhood with a white picket fence. But these were the places—and still are the places—that home the American “aristocracy.” The suburb appears to be the epitome of constructed falsity, then. It is “an inorganic community that pretended above all other virtues to be ‘natural,’” and a collection of people who lived in “exclusivity,” flouting the equality and collectiveness of the democratic American spirit (Kunstler, 56).

In order to answer my second question, I explored the Llewellyn Park website, and discovered that there seem to be several aspects of the community that attempt to give it a distinct sense of place. The biggest contributor seems to be the historical nature of the Park, conveyed by the Historical Society. But there is also a Ladies Association, a 5K Run/Walk, and meet-and-greet landscaping events with Rick Darke.  Llewellyn Park seems to have overcome some of the impersonal and disconnected nature of suburbs through these events; however, when investigating the “LP in the Press” section I discovered an article about the suburb published in the New York Times in 2008. The article recounts the difficulties faced by Anthony and Meredith Ferrara when trying to sell their monstrous $2.8 million LP estate Castlewood in the midst of the subprime mortgage crisis, and, of course, the recession. It would seem that it’s somewhat difficult to unload that piece of real estate when most of the nation doesn’t have $2.8 million to throw around. But Ferrara, quoted in the middle of the piece, does not seem too distraught when he says, “‘We live on a sort of fantasy island here,’” (Martin, 1). I guess sense of place is all relative; the residents of Llewellyn Park might have a sense of place in the Park, but do they have a sense of place of America?

In Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, I was most interested by Jackson’s discussion of moveable homes, and their place in America. There was one particular line that really stuck with me; though most of Jackson’s discussion centers on how moveable dwellings evolved from the need to conserve building supplies, construct cheap shelter quickly, or even relocate at a moment’s notice, Jackson claims that another aspect of a human’s relationship to landscape and home was responsible for cultivating the appeal of moveable dwellings. He says, “I think it has always offered, though for a brief time only, a kind of freedom we often undervalue: the freedom from burdensome emotional ties with the environment […] the freedom to move on to somewhere else” (Jackson, 101).  

Though typically I think we all imagine that a sturdy colonial two-story house, complete with backyard garden and fortified basement, would be the most enticing dwelling, Jackson’s point appeals, I think, to the core of American ideals regarding the land, and especially to the idea of manifest destiny. In these poorly constructed, aesthetically displeasing dwellings, there is no “political landscape” tying man to a framework of dependency and responsibility in a town or village; there is only an “inhabited landscape,” a place where man (in at least a small way) conquers his surrounding environment in his frail shelter, and moves on to conquer the rest of the great nation relinquished to his power by God. This is the ultimate American environmental mindset—to self-sustain and freely indulge in the bounty of all parts of the fertile land, and then to leave them, and move on.

As Jackson points out, the impulse to inhabit these temporary dwellings did not fade as the nation was settled. Nowadays, the trailer has replaced the log cabin, and as we can see even through pop culture references like the movie RV that the dream of waking up every day in a new place has not left the American imagination. Now, more than ever, with increased mobility through motorized trailers like RVs, we are free to dwell in the most temporary sense—for a night, or maybe for just a few hours.

However, the urge to live somewhat nomadically has serious ramifications on the American wildlife and environment. Jackson describes the temporary dwellings of seventeenth and eighteenth century American settlers by explaining that they were “merely a place of land which a family could exploit profitably for a number of years before moving on to where prospects seem brighter,” (Jackson, 97). Obviously, this way of life could have terrible effects on the earth, just like gas-guzzling RVs and inefficient trailer parks consume many natural resources and give off pollution. I did wonder, while reading this section, whether there was perhaps a better way to construct temporary dwellings; whether they could remain a part of the American lifestyle, but transform into something a little friendlier to the earth, like some kind of decomposable housing.

It’s true that the idea behind these temporary dwellings seems to be that someday the family will find a permanent dwelling, settle down, and live in a more ecologically responsible manner. But what happens to the shacks left behind, and the land around them, I wonder? Does it simply become unwanted—a used-up spot on the American landscape? Similarly, is there a “sense of place” associated with these dwellings, or is there transience and distance from all other civilization enough to make them nothing more than a pile of dead logs in a forest?
  

In Chapter 8, Tuan quotes a man named Wright Morris when discussing spatial symbols and the way they affect a place. Morris describes the landscape of the prairie, and says, “Anyone who was born and raised on the plains knows that the high false front on the Feed Store, and the white water tower, are not a question of vanity. It’s a problem of being. Of knowing you are there” (Tuan, 110). I think we have all experienced on a road trip, or a vacation, or maybe even in the town of our childhood home—this frightening and almost terrible expansion of space, this problem of “too much sky” (Tuan, 110). It is the vastness that pushes mankind to construct things simply to know we are here.  Certainly there are scholars and travelers that have also written about the majesty and freedom of the plains and deserts—but it seems to me that Morris is suggesting the other side to this openness. This is the side that invokes a certain kind of terror and lonesomeness that is unique to the unpopulated areas of the country, and inspires the construction of a certain kind of structure.

In Tuan’s following chapters I attempted to discern why exactly such a place would hold this special kind of fear for humans. There are several reasons I’m sure, but in this posted I wanted to touch upon a few that I had not thought of before, but that Tuan made me realize. In the following chapter, “Time in Experiential Space,” Tuan says at one point, “Timelessness is [a] quality of distant places,” and, similarly, “What happens in a distant village can be known here only later,” (Tuan, 122, 120). The fear of the great deserts and plains of West Texas, Nevada, and Utah may come from the underlying feeling that when one enters into such a place, there is a loss of time; a temporal step backwards; a lost connection to the rest of the world. In such a deserted place, we can imagine that there would be no Internet access, or at the most a slow and faulty dial-up connection. We can imagine that our cell phones wouldn’t work because we would have no signal. We can even imagine that there wouldn’t be very many gas stations along the highway.

These modern devices—Internet, cell phones, and cars—are the things that close the gap between large distances, and therefore the things that close the gaps in time. They are the technological “high false front on the Feed Store” in the face of the vastness of the universe. They are the development mankind has made in order to counteract the phenomenon Tuan defines when he discusses how great distances create a sense of timelessness. Sometimes—like in the case Tuan mentions about travel brochures—timelessness due to great distance can be a pleasing and enticing characteristic of a place for a human; it is a relaxing and separated world. But in many instances, distance—and therefore timelessness—can almost be a denial of a place’s existence in a larger world.

In the next chapter Tuan quotes a short story of John Updike’s, in which the main character states, “I, David Kern, am always affected—reassured, nostalgically pleased, even, as a member of my animal species, made proud—by the sight of bare earth that has been smoothed and packed firm by the passage of human feet” (Tuan, 142). For Kern, it is the evidence of human civilization and life—the amount of people it must have taken to pack dirt in mounds—that comforts him, and characterizes his feeling of home. Humans are naturally reassured, as Kern notes, by the evidence of each other’s existence; in the desert, where perhaps there are not enough people to pack dirt, the façade of the Feed Store serves as a gentle reminder that one is not alone.

One example of a place where massive human construction seems deliberately contrasted against the stark desert landscape is Marfa, Texas. I have visited Marfa and the local Chinati Foundation, where the artist Donald Judd set up an art exhibit in the late 1970s. The exhibit is hard to forget—it’s a warehouse full of giant metal reflective rectangles in varying positions. Outside, there is another series of giant concrete rectangles in different positions; against the landscape of the Chihuahuan Desert in West Texas (a “notably underdeveloped region,” according to Wikipedia), the art seems more like a monument to humans’ existence than anything else.

I also found a kind of counterexample of people marking nature with manmade structure from this post on the blog “Dezeen”; these biodegradable sneakers by the Dutch company OAT have wildflower seeds in the tongues of the shoes. You discard the shoes by planting them, and soon after a small patch of flowers pops up to mark the spot. Though this is a plant-based monument, in some ways it is still a monument to human existence. 

When I think of how people experience freedom, I don’t usually think of how a space can empower. Tuan’s discussion of “Spatial Values” in Chapter 4, and his commentary on “Spaciousness and Crowding” in Chapter 5 illuminated for me the idea that space—and the movement capable within it—can give or take away a great amount of freedom for a person.

In Chapter 4, Tuan says, “People may work in the same building and yet experience different worlds because their unequal status propels them into different circulatory routes and work areas” (Tuan, 41). He also discusses the way higher floors and rooms in buildings have traditionally housed upper class or more powerful citizens. Buildings, in a sense, become a kind of government; there are different levels of access dependent on how educated or powerful a citizen one is, and in turn these lead to different levels of knowledge of the building, and its residents and activities. An uncomfortable or unpleasant building, therefore, may not simply be unlikable because of ugly wall paint or bad lighting—it may have an authoritative or dictating structure as well.

This made me think of a situation at the office where I am employed, in a new building that is part of the Law School. The floors are arranged in large rectangles with interspersed columns. The outer edge of each floor is lined with offices with windows and doors; the middle is filled with a vast field of cubicles with walls about four feet high. I work on the first floor, but on the upper floors there are balconies with faculty access only. The structure of this building obviously lends itself to a very potent authoritative atmosphere, and embodies many of the traditional power structures Tuan mentioned (higher floors with exclusive access, etc.). The random column placement seems to almost intentionally block one’s view from all entrances that might bring distraction. Instead of having a clear line of vision to the elevators, stair doors, or even offices on the opposite wall, the cubicle worker is completely blocked off by these sporadic columns. As you may guess, it means that I am constantly greeting people who come to my cubicle with a terrified jump and screech, and near heart attack, since I have no clear line of vision. I would argue that this lack of sight leads to a lack of knowledge of the building; those who have the outer offices—and can see everything clearly—have much greater knowledge of what is happening in the building. The faculty only balconies don’t help to make this building more democratic, either.

This leads me to the next point of Tuan’s argument I found very interesting—that spaciousness can be achieved sometimes simply by doing something very freeing. The example I’m thinking of is the hockey player Nesterinko who felt so free when he stopped his car on the street to ice skate. Nesterinko’s story struck me because I have always felt a really incredible sense of freedom when I am given the opportunity to walk down the middle of a street—it’s amazing! On Thursday, when snow was still thick on the streets around my apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, I went to get some dinner and walked the whole way down the middle of the streets. I felt such a huge sense of empowerment simply because I was moving in a space usually restricted to me on foot. Similarly, a colleague of mine who is not Law School faculty recently was granted secret access to the faculty-only balconies in the building where we work.  He came back from his adventure and told everyone how the balconies themselves weren’t that incredible—but the ability to walk around on them was exhilarating. Sometimes the most freeing element of a space is simply the ability to see things from a perspective usually denied to you. As Nesterinko said, “’I have a feeling that this is the innate desire of man’” (Tuan, 52).  

There are few places I have ever enjoyed more than a small breezeway in an old house in east Texas. The only time I ever visited this breezeway was on a trip to Atlanta, Texas, with my best friend, Sarah, on a hot July morning the summer after I turned eighteen. The breezeway is located in the converted schoolhouse where Sarah’s great-grandmother—then ninety-two—lived. It is dark, and quiet, and nothing fancy.

The house that contains the breezeway was where Sarah’s great-grandmother taught school when she was first married, in the mid-1930s. It was only one room then, a room that later became her kitchen and living room; she had even moved her bed into it when I was there since her husband had passed away and her legs were getting worse. Her husband built other rooms onto the main room when he converted the schoolhouse—rooms to sleep in, extra bedrooms for their children. But most of the house is in the one room in the middle, the original room, where a very long line of bookshelves on the northern wall holds a very long line of framed pictures, that age and yellow as you look farther to the left, where the biggest and oldest frames hold bleached photographs of faces smiling through dust. The walls are the color of pale parchment, and there are peach curtains that flutter over open windows.

The breezeway sits to the left of the main room. It is a very necessary part of the house, because there is no central air conditioning. The walls are light blue and there are three large navy recliners to sit in. It looks out onto a neighborhood of small houses and doublewide trailers.

On the hot July morning when I visited Sarah’s great-grandmother, I sat in her breezeway and heard the cicadas screaming at nine a.m. There were smells of red clay and Jiffy biscuits, breakfast sausage and the mold that encroaches on any east Texas house after years of spring flooding from the low land and cracked foundations. There were mosquitoes already clinging to our legs, shooting tinny whistles past our ears. There was dampness from the morning humidity clinging to the cloth of the navy recliners, and there was a very soft, very cool, very gentle breeze that I didn’t know could blow in July in Texas until that morning. The light was low and dappled in the front of the breezeway from trees shading the house from the sun. The air felt thick but not heavy; it was warm, like a swimming pool in the sun.  

Jennifer Cross quoted a woman named Natalie in her article who said, “This place and the people are infused on my psyche.” The breezeway in Atlanta is "infused on my psyche"; it is what I miss when I miss Texas. It is everything familiar--both good and bad--and everything learned from my childhood home; it is the comfort and safeness of knowing that breezeway has been cooling Texans for nearly a century, and will continue to cool them in the future.