Courteney's blog

In my very first blog post, I described what I considered to be a good place: my parents' walk-in closet in my old childhood home. As I explained, the time I spent in that place strengthened in me the desire to write, to craft stories that I could share with others. It's been years since I've seen that place, and, at the moment, I'm working on making my childhood dreams come true.

But now I'm in a whole new place - New York City - and it has been almost impossible since I started at NYU to remember what that strong desire to write felt like back in that walk-in closet. It's a feeling that I need now more than ever because, in the city that never sleeps, one is always competing against others to be the best in what they want to do. After an exhausting semester and another one (my last one) on its way, I think I might need that passion back to push me through.

It's not easy to recreate the specific feeling one gets in a special place. As we've learned throughout the semester, there are many different factors involved in creating a certain sense of place. New York is perhaps the complete opposite of my parents' walk-in closet. Despite this fact, thanks to this class, I've learned to pay more attention to my surroudnings, to find the spaces in the city that echo back to that special place.

The first step to making these discoveries was slowing down. It’s hard work, slowing one’s mind and body and opening them to one’s surroundings, especially in a fast-moving city like New York. But it was unavoidable. For the journalism class I took this semester, all of my work was focused on a specific place – the West Village, which I wrote a post about, too – and a large part of what I had to do to succeed in the class was to be more aware of my surroundings.

In doing so, in taking the time to walk a little more slowly, to pay a little more attention to the people and the places surrounding me, I eventually forged a deep connection to the West Village and to many of its residents. It helped to take this class at the same time as my journalism one because it made me so much more aware of what I was experiencing in relation to others and in relation to the spaces through which I moved. My head was thinking on two different levels when I interviewed others about why the West Village was so significant to them. With all that we've learned, it was so much easier for me to understand the importance of this place, especially to locals.

Although I still have a lot to learn about the area – and the rest of New York, for that matter – I feel there, perhaps more than in any place else, the same kind of feeling I used to have in that walk-in closet so many years ago. Maybe it’s the winding streets, the bustle of people, or the unique neighborly atmosphere that calls to my mind that closet. It might even be the history of the place, the fact that it used to be a hub for artists and writers alike, that inspires me to keep chugging on even when I feel I have no energy left to report or to write.

Whatever the case, I know that whenever I walk those streets, somehow finding my way around to say hello to local residents or friendly storeowners, I am flooded with that feeling, that strong sense of place, an echo of my old home.

Within my first few weeks at NYU, I was happy to have snagged a job as a Team Leader for Jumpstart, an Americorps program promoting language and literacy in preschool aged children coming from primarily low-income and immigrant communities. My parents were, too, until we all found out that I would be working at a daycare center on the Lower East Side run by Grand Street Settlement, a service institution founded in 1916 to aid immigrants settling into city.

They attempted to talk me out of taking the job because – like parents usually are – they were afraid for my safety. To be fair, at that point the most of New York I had experienced was Times Square and other tourist destinations, so I could understand their concern. Towards the beginning of the semester, before I started trekking to the LES for work, my parents and I took a drive down there to check out the area. When we reached the housing development that contained the daycare center, my parents weren’t very pleased at what they saw.

Huge towers stood spaced apart on a large swath of land filled in with small grassy areas, large trees, and winding sidewalks. The people walking around were of all different colors, like other parts of New York, but the area itself wasn’t very similar to where I was living for the year at Brittany Hall on 10th Street. Across the street from the space at which I would be working stood a Key Food store, a pizza shop, and a drugstore all nestled between worn brick walls splattered with graffiti.

I got an earful from my parents on the way back up to my dorm and the familiar bustle of Broadway, but I ignored what they had to say. I wasn’t willing to give up my job because of a first glance at an area that was completely alien to me. I wanted to get to know the parts of New York City I had never realized existed, and the Lower East Side was where I would start. I found out quickly that the mere appearance of the place and the people walking its streets could never communicate its whole story.

It was easy in the beginning to get intimidated by the large housing towers and the dozens of people milling about the sidewalks outside of them, especially when I felt so out of place. I spent most of my time around these housing towers; at the bottom of one of them sat the daycare center at which I worked. Many of the children I worked with in my years there lived in the surrounding housing developments, which were collectively named the Bernard M. Baruch Houses.

Completed in 1959, the Baruch Houses were named for Bernard M. Baruch, who hit it big on Wall Street and acted as an economic advisor and confidante to several presidents. According to NYC.gov, the housing development is the largest in Manhattan, with 17 buildings – each seven, 13, or 14 stories tall – and 2,194 apartments housing over 5,000 people altogether, many of whom are minorities or immigrants.

Like the towers Jane Jacobs visited in East Harlem, the areas within the middle of the Baruch Houses were usually empty save for the people travelling to and from their apartments. The streets further away from the Baruch Houses – lined with different restaurants, markets, and clothing stores – were where many more people could be found hanging around. In fact, when I started feeling comfortable enough to venture around the neighborhood, I would often run into some of the children from the daycare center there, following closely behind their parent or grandparent.
 
It was in my explorations of the Lower East Side that I discovered that the whole area wasn’t like the space immediately surrounding the Baruch Houses. As I slowly headed away from the housing developments and into the middle of the Lower East Side, I found an odd mix of higher-end restaurants or stores and hole-in-the-wall ethnic food or bargain clothing establishments. The streets are small and lined with shorter buildings fronted with rickety fire escape ladders. They are not as clean as those one might find walking around somewhere like the West Village or Soho, but it’s hard to ignore the slow intermeshing of old and new.
 
As the area has begun to change more and more, it seems the community is being pushed even further towards the edge of their own neighborhood. The Baruch Houses run all the way to the East River and are bordered on the south by the Williamsburg Bridge. Delancey Street, where I usually ran into families I knew, and Houston Street run parallel through the LES; in between them sits an area where gentrification has already begun to take place, especially along streets such as Orchard and Clinton. Ironically, Orchard Street contains the Tenement Museum where the books and tours describe the long and winding history of the Lower East Side. The contrast between the old and new is even easier to feel at night when the darkened streets become filled with loud club-goers from all over the city and beyond.
 
But this isn’t the first time the Lower East Side has undergone such changes; in fact, it is almost defined by the cultural shifts it has undergone over the years, most notably in the immigrant communities that have moved in and out of the area. Although mostly populated by Black, Asian, and Latino populations today, in the past, the Lower East Side had been filled with immigrants from Eastern Europe. The movement of people has helped to shape the place into what it is today, a huge melting-pot of cultures.
 
That is why, despite this new shift, the slow spread of trendy restaurants and stores into the center of the LES, it’s difficult for me to believe that the locals can be completely pushed out, though perhaps they might be marginalized even further. I believe this especially because much of the community occupies such a large amount of concentrated space in the form of the Baruch Houses, essentially an anchor for locals that other gentrified areas, such as Soho and the West Village, did not have as changes began to take place.
 
But at the same time that the houses help to anchor the community and its culture, the closed-loop circulation of people within the developments themselves and within much of the poorly-funded public infrastructure has an effect on the success of those who grow up there. In fact, that was the very reason why I was working at the daycare center, which was not stocked with the same resources that many other ones throughout the city are able to obtain without a problem. By helping the children keep up with their language, literacy, and social-emotional skills, we hoped to ensure better success in school, which would then in turn help them succeed later on in life.
 
In the years that I worked in the area, it had always been the local community and resulting culture, rather than the newer food or clothing establishments, that had defined the place for me. By the time my two years of Americorps service were up and my last day at the daycare center had come, I no longer felt out of place walking alongside the Baruch Houses on Columbia Street. The tall towers were not intimidating, but familiar. On my way home, I often preferred to travel down the wide sidewalk nestled between the housing developments and the Williamsburg Bridge and then up the large and bustling Delancey because I liked running into families I knew.
 
It’s been many months since I returned to the daycare center on the LES and visited the families and children I had become close with over my years working there. The closest trips I have taken down to the area have been to my friend’s apartment on the corner of Essex and Stanton. At night, the streets are loud and filled with people from all over the city and even from other states who come for the bars, the nightclubs, the overall entertainment provided by the neighborhood. Perhaps, like I had been, many of them are unaware of the community that sleeps just a handful of blocks away, thriving in a place they call home.

In reading Michael Sorkin’s chapter on Soho in Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, I couldn’t help but agree with some of his views on gentrification, especially because I had the opportunity to experience living in Soho last year. In his discussion of gentrification’s effects on neighborhoods, he writes, "Gentrification suppresses reciprocity by its narrowed scripting of formal and social behavior, by turning neighborhoods into Disneylands or Colonial Williamsburgs, where residents become cast members and the rituals of everyday life become spectacle or food for consumption" (145).
 
Such Disneyfication of Soho was hard to ignore in my months spent living there. I made it a point to avoid Broadway at all costs, often walking down Lafayette to bypass the herds of tourists crowding the streets and making it impossible to get home without cursing in frustration, much in the same way Sorkin does when he nearly collides with the yuppy mother’s stroller.
 
Despite this annoyance, I very much enjoyed my experience living there because of the quieter parts of the neighborhood available to stroll around, mostly to the east of Broadway, which Sorkin describes as “what has always been a residential neighborhood, an amalgam of tenements and row-houses that was long predominantly Italian….” (139)
 
At the same time, it was hard not to take advantage of the chic factor that living in Soho afforded and that was very much due to the gentrification of the area that has taken place over the past few decades. I feel that by living there and taking advantage of what the words, “Oh, I’m living in Soho,” would mean to others, I may have been exploiting the neighborhood just as badly as the tourists walking its streets and reveling in its trendy, overly consumptive atmosphere.
 
The fact that others not as familiar with the city often associate Soho with its commercially driven areas and overall swanky status (mostly due to its high-end stores and the celebrities who frequent them) is very telling in and of itself. If one were to remove the many high-end stores lining of its streets and the millions of tourists that flock to them every week, it would be much easier to see what Soho used to be. It would perhaps even call to mind the same quaint atmosphere that the Village (thankfully) still provides to many because of the shorter buildings and narrower streets.
 
I think at this point, however, the area is just too saturated with commercialism to be converted back to the artist’s haven it once was, which very much colors the neighborhood as it is now and its current reputation to people across the country and the world.
 
As Sorkin explains Jacobs’ view, “that architecture has the capacity to aid and abet forms of association and affinity that are at the core of such places,” the distinct architecture of Soho, which housed many an artist, helped to inform the neighborhood in its development over the years and led it to become what it is now. Whether the form Soho has taken today is a good or bad thing, however, depends more on the person walking its streets than the buildings lining them.
 
 

In the chapter entitled, “The Stoop,” in his book, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, Michael Sorkin explains the complex relationship between public and private space. He shares his experiences with this particular architectural feature and expands to include his thoughts on the subject in other contexts, such as in airplanes or at Disneyland. In an anecdote about his wife and his failed attempt at contributing to one of their old neighborhood’s social gatherings (68-69), I was reminded of the floor on which I lived in Brittany Hall back when I was a freshman.

In the same way that the stoop in Sorkin’s neighborhood encouraged interaction and participation, the open door and hallway invited communication amongst neighbors on my old floor. In many instances, the hallway is thought of as merely a space of transition, from the more public outside on the street to one’s private home. In a place with no stoops but filled with many people trying to find a sense of community, opening one’s door was akin to Sorkin’s old neighbor, Jane, spending time on their building’s stoop and interacting with passers-by.

The layout of the hallway, in addition to our willingness to leave our doors open, very much facilitated communication amongst neighbors; like a one-way street, once one emerged from the stairwell (hardly ever the elevator, since we were only on the second floor), there was really only one direction you could go - to the left, to walk down the hall where one would have no choice but to pass every door until reaching his or her own.

In contrast, the layout of the floor in my sophomore year dorm on Broome Street was more complicated; depending on where you lived on the floor, you could pass many doors or hardly any doors at all. My suite was nestled in a corner a short walk away from the elevators, which meant that I only ever passed one door on my way to mine. Also, by sophomore year, friendships are often already established, and the drive that freshman usually have to meet new people and find a community was, at least for me, almost gone or at least directed elsewhere.

Based on these contrasting experiences, I feel that although the architectural features Sorkin discusses work well to facilitate a sense of community and caring for one’s neighborhood - both for the people in it and the physical place itself - it still takes human motivation and one's own choice to leave the door open or step up to a neighbor’s open door to say hello.

Although I walk by it every day, I don’t often think about Washington Square Park’s rich history and the central role it has played throughout its existence for the surrounding Greenwich Village community. I relate to it mostly as a New York University student; although it’s not technically part of the campus, it’s the closest thing NYU has to the typical quad around which many other colleges are centered.
 
But obviously, as Anthony Flint demonstrates in Wrestling with Moses, the park has served many different people in various ways. Reading through the third chapter in which Flint discusses the history of the park and the difficult battle that occurred between the villainous Robert Moses and the Greenwich Village community really brought the park to life for me in a new way.
 
I had heard some of its history over my time at NYU, but reading through its many uses throughout the years and even becoming aware of the different actors involved in the conflict demonstrated for me how one single place can be defined by many groups of people, and, in turn, help to define and essentially serve as an anchor for these groups.
 
Part of what made the park such a powerful and influential place was its accessibility and the fact that it was “unplanned and organic. It was everything that was proper and respectable and aristocratic about New York City life – and at the same time it represented rebellion against the establishment, authority, and order.” (71)
 
What Moses sought to do was tame the space, eliminate the very features that made it the unique place it was to students, visitors, and long-time community residents in order to put up in its place infrastructure he believed would benefit the rest of the city – or at least benefit him as its creator.
 
Although Flint most definitely portrays Moses as a malevolent and manipulative character, at least he does not forget to mention the success and popularity of some of his other work, which shaped the city into what it is today. It seems that some of those changes were needed and beneficial; as far as others go, it is clearer now to see how harmful they would have been for the city.
 
In the future, we can only hope that the changes that occur throughout the city are ones that can strike the right balance between progress benefitting the people and preservation of the place that helps bring these people together into communities. This is the kind of balance that Moses ignored in most cases because rather than recognizing the importance of the city’s communities, he overlooked them to think of the whole.
 
But the reality is, just as the city shapes the millions of people living in it, the diverse neighborhoods that exist here make New York what it is; demolishing the structures that support them inevitably changes these communities and, therefore, changes the city - whether for better or worse only time could tell. Thankfully, in the case of Moses and his power-hungry architectural romp around New York, Jane Jacobs stepped in before any of us had to find out.

In Chapter 5 of A Place of My Own, Michael Pollan discusses the process of framing his wooden hut using two very different practices: the slower and difficult process of post-and-beam framing and the much quicker and easier balloon framing method.
 
Even further than describing his physical efforts in both of these practices, Pollan introduces the contexts in which each of these building methods was used in the past and the transition from one to the other. He explains:
 
"The shift from post-and-beam to balloon framing (named for the dubious-seeming lightness of the new structure) marks an important change not only in the history of wood construction, but also in the practice of architecture, the work of building, and even, it seems, in the way that people think about space and place." (145)
 
Pollan’s subsequent discussion brought to my mind a town in the New Jersey Pineland Preservation area called Medford Lakes, which began as a resort where all structures were built with cedar logs. According to the town’s website, for years only log cabins were permitted to be constructed in the area. It wasn’t until the 1950s that restrictions were relaxed to allow houses with artificial log siding.
 
A short ten-minute drive away is Medford, New Jersey, a booming residential area filled with the type of balloon-framed houses with which we are familiar today and about which Pollan writes. The change when driving from one town to the other, although gradual, is noticeable. While passing through Medford Lakes, one gets a distinct sense of place brought to life by the heavily wooded landscape and the log cabins hidden throughout the trees.
 
In the same way that Pollan feels a greater sense of permanence and reverence for the landscape in his wood-built structure, traveling through Medford Lakes brings a certain feeling of history and intimacy that one doesn’t get when passing through nearby areas. Much of this feeling comes from the unique appearances of these log cabins and the way that they are laid out throughout the town. Had balloon-framed houses been scattered about Medford Lakes, it is likely that the heavily wooded area would not have the same atmosphere.
 
It’s as if the many log cabins and other buildings of Medford Lakes were placed more carefully and with more thought about the surrounding landscape than the structures spread throughout other towns. The harmonious relationship between these built forms and the landscape around them is at once more apparent and more natural.
 
Pollan strove for this type of balance when he planned and later built his hut in the area behind his house. He took great pains to make sure his building blended well with the natural flow of the landscape both in position and in appearance. Like the log cabins in Medford Lakes, Pollan’s structure both defined a unique place for him and was defined by the forested space around it.

Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own is unique from the other readings we have encountered so far this semester in that he plunges into the story of this special place not after it has already been created and seen years of life but before it has even been built.

We’ve discussed throughout this semester how a place is set apart from the rest of the space around it; it seems that for many of us, when looking at a certain space on the same personal level as Pollan does at his, our physical activity and resulting emotional experience within a certain area plays a huge role in how we view, value, and assign a singular sense of place to said space.

However, Pollan’s approach to this structure he plans to build stands out from the others’ because its sense of place is built not only through memory, but also through Pollan’s own physical labor. His deep exploration into the world of architecture brought to him the knowledge of how we as a society have come to shape the space around us into distinct places full of meaning and value, and, using this knowledge, he created a physical structure that effectively shaped part of the space behind his house into a meaningful place for him.

Part of creating his structure involved building in the physical features that would, for Pollan, create the particular sense of place he was looking for, pieces of physical spatial experiences he desired to be in his space. His putting together these bits and pieces to create a certain atmosphere within and around the structure he built is similar to how we unconsciously piece together past experiences of a place to give it a particular meaning. In fact, Pollan's nostalgic preface to the book seems to indicate that after the hut had been finished, he continued to build its meaning in the way of memory and experience (ix - xvii).

In this way, Pollan demonstrates the complicated ways by which we influence our spaces and, in turn, our spaces influence us. Interestingly enough, the methods he used in planning and building this structure worked in the same way that writing often does. It’s as if the small haven he made for himself was a story, each architectural feature a character, each plank and nail a sentence and word. It seems even in this activity of physical labor, Pollan could not escape his writer tendencies.

He even describes how he came to assign this special place its unique meaning in literary terms, writing, “To build a house in the first person, a place as much one’s own as a second skin, would require an exploration of self and place – and work itself – that simply could not be delegated to somebody else. The meaning of such a place was in its making.” (24)

When I was young, distance was never a problem. Each of the schools I attended was only a five-minute drive from my house. On days we were lucky, my dad would have time to drop my brother and I off before heading to work. In all the times I spent those five minutes in the car with my dad, I memorized his mixed tape of Frank Sinatra songs. They’re all on a CD now. I still know the order of the songs – and all of their words – even though I don’t drive around with him much anymore.
 
Washington Township, New Jersey, has one kindergarten, six elementary schools, three middle schools, and one high school. Thousands of children, mostly white, began and ended their pre-college education together. The township itself stretches across 23 square miles of land, land that used to hold a Lenni Lenape Native American village and then later a patchwork of farms owned by families whose names are now shared by streets, schools, and neighborhoods. Over the years, as the town became one of the fastest growing in the state, housing developments and shopping centers began to crowd the landscape to match the needs of the thousands of people moving there to start their families, their new lives.
 
My parents bought their first house in May of 1988. They waited the months until the house was finished in their old apartment in Pennsylvania. Finally, in February 1989, they moved onto Saddlebrook Drive in a housing development called Colts Neck. My sister was three years old. I was born the next year, and my brother was born the year after. Their new life, my whole life began in those rooms where, in the summer, my brother, sister, and I would play Don’t Touch the Ground, jumping from surface to surface, scaling doorframes and walls, or Hide-and-Seek. I was small then and could fit in cabinets, the top shelf of the linen closet, under beds, behind couches. We came to know every nook and cranny of our home.
 
Colts Neck was raised in 1988 by Orleans Homebuilders, a company that has been building homes for families in Pennsylvania and New Jersey since 1918. It contains six different models of three- to four-bedroom homes sitting on one-fifth acre lots. In the past 10 years, Orleans has extended its reach past New Jersey and Pennsylvania to North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and even Illinois. They no longer build any of the six models in Colts Neck.
 
When I was young, distance was never a problem. I came to memorize the streets of my hometown because I rarely had to leave it. Holy Family Church was just five minutes away. Chestnut Ridge Middle School was just five minutes away. Dr. Medina’s office was just five minutes away. The nearness of everything needed is a luxury I no longer have.

Even though I never had to spend much time on the road, I would always play a game where I would close my eyes and imagine what I would see out of the window as the car drove along and made its turns on our way home. No matter where we were coming from, I always knew when to open my eyes – right as we pulled into our driveway. The house before us looked like many of the other houses in Colts Neck – part brick, part siding, a two-car garage – just different in color and in landscape. It looked the same on the outside, but what mattered, what set it apart was hidden where the neighbors couldn’t see.


Photo above: My sister and I at our old house in Washington Township, New Jersey.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as an aspiring journalist, it’s to be observant. I have been training for the last three years, and even before then, to look at the world with a critical eye, to ask questions, to study what’s right in front of me and figure out how to step back and see the larger picture. This semester, I am being challenged more than ever to keep my eyes peeled and my ears open to the world around me. It just so happens that my assigned “world” or beat for this semester is the unique and historic West Village.

This section of New Yok City – traditionally bounded on the north by 14th Street, on the south by Houston Street, and stretching from 6th Avenue west towards the Hudson River – is different from the rest of Manhattan in a variety of ways. One of the most obvious is the fact that its winding streets don’t follow the rest of the city’s well-known grid layout. If you walk up West 4th Street, you’ll eventually end at 13th Street, which definitely doesn’t make traditional sense, but such is the West Village and its European-like, wandering roads.

Even though traveling through the West Village can get confusing for those who haven’t been there before and even occasionally for those who have, it has always been a place to which people of all types have flocked. There’s just something about the West Village and the atmosphere that it has that makes it different from the rest of Manhattan’s many neighborhoods.

But before I even begin to explain what the West Village is now, it is important to touch on the neighborhood’s past. The West Village’s history, reflected not only in the neighborhood’s unique spatial layout but also in the many buildings preserved in the West Village’s historic district, has had a large influence on this area’s singular sense of place.

According to the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation's website, the West Village was originally a pastoral suburb during the American Revolution. After the war, the edge of the Hudson River flourished commercially through fresh produce markets. The neighborhood’s secluded location on the far west side of Manhattan made it an ideal place to which people fleeing from the explosion of yellow fever and cholera could escape. As a result, temporary housing and some banking offices were constructed. In the end, many of those who had traveled to this area planning to stay temporarily ended up living there permanently, drastically increasing the area’s population in a short period of time and resulting in even more residential and commercial development. Many of the low-rise buildings still standing in the West Village today were built at this time.

For most of the 1800s, people of different ethnic backgrounds and social standings moved in and out of the area. In the late 1800s, when immigration began to increase dramatically, wealthier residents moved uptown leaving in their wake the commercialization of the neighborhood. It was also around this time that the West Village experienced a rise in Bohemianism. Art, radicalism, and nonconformity became the focus of the area in the early to mid-1900s. Remnants of this movement are still attached to most people's perceptions of the West Village.

In addition to the Bohemian movement, the West Village and its neighbor, Greenwich Village, birthed the Beat Movement and the start of a revolution for gay and lesbian rights. In fact, the movement is said to have begun right on Christopher Street at the Stonewall Inn. These influential events sprung up between the 1950s and 1970s, setting the neighborhood apart from the rest of the city as a haven not only for a number of artists and musicians but also for much of Manhattan’s gay population. In the 1980s, homelessness hit the West Village as well as an influx in immigrants from other areas of the world, mostly from the Middle East and Asia. Much of the artistic, laid-back vibe the West Village used to have has shifted to the near-by East Village, but the neighborhood still contains a lot of its character and history in its architecture, its businesses, and its people.

With such a rich, fluctuating history, it’s no wonder that the West Village was and still is often seen as an area unique from the rest of Manhattan, sometimes even as a haven from the rest of the city’s imposing high-rises and many busy, fast-moving residents. But what is maybe more important when examining the current atmosphere of the West Village is not necessarily the history itself, but the effect that this history has had on the architecture of the area and its inhabitants.
           
Because much of the West Village was established before the city decided to lay out its streets in a grid pattern, the region is spatially different from the rest of Manhattan, creating almost a natural separation between the West Village and the areas resting outside of it. Within the border, this unusual layout has enabled a certain kind of atmosphere, a sense of place that is not so easily found in other parts of the city. Instead of streets crossing at pointy right angles, the West Village’s narrow cobbled roads cut across each other in ways that naturally create such spaces as Abingdon Square Park or Jackson Square, public sitting areas that offer to passers-by a place to relax, to slow down and interact with those around them. This spatial structure helps to foster that strong sense of community that the West Village has.

The neighborhood’s Federal-style low-rise row houses, many of them built for the working-class population of the West Village in the mid-1800s, offer just the right amount of openness while still maintaining a sense of intimacy, especially on the quiet tree-lined streets hidden in the heart of the neighborhood. Besides creating this calm atmosphere, these structures inevitably call to mind and emit the very history that created them, a history strongly connected to the West Village’s local community. This last point is perhaps most important; the kinds of people that have come to inhabit this neighborhood have helped to shape it into what it has become and have also influenced others’ perceptions of it.

Unfortunately it seems it has been difficult recently for the West Village to maintain the characteristics that have given it its unique sense of place for so long, and, as a result, the neighborhood’s atmosphere is slowly beginning to change. The very things that created its singular sense of place – its winding European-like streets, its low-rise historic architecture, and its diverse community – are no longer meshing as well they used to. This is largely due to the affluent outsiders and big-name corporations that are entering and messing up the mix.

One of the biggest problems affecting the West Village – and really all other historic neighborhoods in Manhattan – is development. Development throughout the West Village of both residential and commercial spaces, especially on the edge of the Hudson River, has not only changed the architectural landscape of the area but has also drawn in large numbers of those wealthy enough to stake their claim on a piece of prize West Village real estate. This influx of affluent residents inevitably affected the long-established community of the West Village. Changes in the architectural landscape and changes in the community result in changes in the atmosphere – and not necessarily good ones.

Ironically, what has often drawn and still draws people to the West Village from far and wide – the spunky, yet historic atmosphere, the unique sense of place that the area has within the greater context of Manhattan – is being degraded as development and gentrification continue throughout the neighborhood. One of the largest effects this trend has had on the West Village is the replacement of locally-owned establishments with higher-end restaurants and brand name shops, such as Marc Jacobs – which now has six stores in the area, four of them on Bleecker Street alone – and Ralph Lauren.

I have discovered that this is what most saddens many of the local residents I have talked to so far -- the slow disappearance of the local shops, restaurants, and other establishments that have helped to define what the West Village is. These establishments demonstrate the relationship between people of the community – many of these businesses were individually owned by local residents – the architectural layout of the area, and the history that lies in both of these things.

Residents who have lived in the West Village for many years connect to the area through the people and places with which they share a history. All of these things t hreaded together is what eventually wove the West Village into the diverse fabric it has always been and hopefully will continue to be. But pulling on any one of these threads too hard, changing any one of these things too drastically, could make the whole thing unravel, and it seems that this is just what's starting to happen. Lately, I have been hearing from local residents the same lamentation: “It’s just not what it used to be.”

In much of Chapter 9 of The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler discusses the architectural evolution of the typical American house and how the changes that took place were a reflection of and an influence on our progressing society.
 
At one point towards the end of the chapter, Kunstler touches on current building codes and zoning regulations; these rules make it difficult to build houses in the older architectural styles that strongly evoke the sense of home or community we so often look for in our personal dwellings and surroundings. He explains:
 

There are a great many fine examples of “Victorian” houses in Saratoga. These are the houses that wear the little brass plaques from the town historical society. These are the houses that tourists still come to see and enjoy, the houses that the community treasures, that give the town its character, its charm, that make the place worth caring about. (170)

This particular passage reminds me of a small town in South Jersey about ten minutes away from my high school. Europeans first settled in Haddonfield, New Jersey, about 300 years ago. The main street and those branching from it are lined with stores and houses of different sizes and styles that show the town’s age. In fact, Haddonfield contains many of the different house styles Kunstler mentions in the chapter.
 
When traveling through Haddonfield, one definitely gets a sense of the past and a sense of community. Walking down the main street, Kings Highway, is nothing like walking through the halls of the nearby Cherry Hill Mall, especially because of the friendly, small-town atmosphere the mall clearly lacks. The unique shops lining the street and overall personable locals inevitably call to mind the charm about which Kunstler writes (168).
 
But it is the combination of all of these things – the many houses of various architectural styles and sizes, the main street crowded with friendly people and lined with a variety of small shops – that enables this small-town charm. As Kunstler suggests, it is likely that without one of these components, the whole atmosphere of the place would change.
 
His point is even further proven for me when I think about my neighbor’s Victorian-style house. I live in a rural part of New Jersey in a wooded development set far back from the road. Our neighborhood is relatively new, but even despite this fact, I feel like it would be difficult to create a sense of community similar to the one that can be found in Haddonfield.
 
The only thing that separates our house from our neighbor’s is a couple hundred feet and some trees, but that Victorian-style house, along with all of the others in my neighborhood, seem to be a world away. In my development, at least, it seems that it doesn’t matter what type of house you have or what that particular architectural style may call to mind for you. It’s true that a house can become one’s home over time, but whether or not one’s neighborhood can eventually grow into a cohesive, supportive community without some kind of glue is a different story.

In Chapter 3 of his book, The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler discusses the national grid and its effect on our country’s landscape. Although this system made it easier to divide and sell land, as Kunstler asserts, the grid had its drawbacks in both rural and urban areas (30).
 
Despite the fact that so many people lived so closely within cities, their main focus in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was not community but business. This was reflected in the grid layout, which helped to more efficiently house inhabitants.
 
This system was especially important in New York where the grid helped fit as many immigrant workers – who were flooding into Manhattan by the boatload – as possible on one piece of land, therefore benefitting the warehouses and factories in Manhattan that needed them. Unfortunately, this “mechanistic layout of linear streets and avenues” did not result in a “memorable cityscape” for New York (32).
 
When I first started visiting this city, I didn’t see the uniformity that had initially been adopted in the name of efficiency. Everything felt new and different despite the city’s strict gridded streets. Now that I commute to New York every day, I can feel this “deadening uniformity” that Kunstler describes (33).
 
Living in the city and feeling apart of it was a very different experience from the detached one I now feel as a commuter. It is like its streets reflect my monotonous daily routine, which really leaves me no time to explore the city further and discover new things just by wandering around. It is turning into a place of business for me, one in which all I have time to do is go to class and leave.
 
Nowadays, even though New York is still largely a place of business for many people and for our country as a whole, over the years, its inhabitants have overcome the mind-numbing monotony of the grid and have created different communities across the city, many of which sprouted from the immigrant populations who moved to and stayed in Manhattan.
 
These small communities existing in New York have come to define it as a center for culture in addition to a center for business. For newcomers such as me, I still have a lot to learn about the city and the communities that have carved out a place of their own within it. I’m sure once I move back in, the obvious grid streets will fall into the background once again, and I will be able to see New York for what it has really become: still a center of business but also a center of diversity, community participation, and culture. It may not yet be “an organic whole, reflecting the idea of civilization as a spiritual enterprise,” as Kunstler describes “the great cities of Europe” to be, but I think it has come a long way from what it had been several generations ago (33).

J.B. Jackson spends a great many pages of Discovering the Vernacular Landscape complicating our usual definition of the word. He does this not only by stripping it down to its roots but also by observing how, as a concept, it has evolved throughout history to become what it is today. Despite a long discussion, it is still difficult to completely pin down what “landscape” means because it exists in different forms in different places.
 
Jackson’s chapter, “A Pair of Ideal Landscapes,” was especially interesting; by observing history, he was able to identify for us two different types of landscapes: one reflecting the importance of political infrastructure and permanence and the other showing the mystical connection we have with the environment as natural ever-changing and moving actors within the landscape.
 
He returns to these landscapes in his last chapter, “Concluding with Landscapes,” and presents to us a third landscape that is essentially a balance of the other two. I found myself drawn to Jackson’s assertions regarding this third landscape because of their applicability to many people's views on our environment.
 
Much of our country's current landscape reinforces the political infrastructure of our society. The way that we have arranged our space throughout history encourages the idea of societal participation. What is probably a less prominent feeling in people is that indescribable connection to our environment, the feeling that we are not simply manipulators of the landscape but are actually parts of a greater whole. It is not often that many of us come across any spatial features that reinforce this feeling within us in the same way that roads or monuments remind us of our connection to the rest of society.
 
As Jackson points out, both of these landscapes are necessary in their own way, but what is most important is that we find a balance between the two. The world that existed when Jackson wrote this book is very different from the world in which we live now; it is perhaps more important at this present moment to find a balance between these existing landscapes because of the many environmental issues with which we are constantly struggling.
 
He finally concludes with a clarified and more nuanced definition of “landscape”: “[L]andscape is not a scenery, it is not a political unit; it is really no more than a collection, a system of man-made spaces on the surface of the earth….We create them and need them because every landscape is the place where we establish our human organization of space and time.” (156)
 
Jackson emphasizes the fact that we are the ones who organize our space to serve a specific purpose that benefits us, and so, it is only in changing ourselves and the way that we perceive our environment that we may create that perfect balance, that third landscape, which will perhaps help us achieve better relationships amongst ourselves and with our natural environment.

We discussed in class last week the effect that travel can have on one’s sense of place; on a subway, train, or plane, some travelers may feel caught in an in-between, like they are suspended between places in space. In contrast, biking, an example that was used in class, offers a different experience because the traveler is exerting effort to get to his or her goal; he or she is taking an active part in the journey.
 
Tuan brings up a similar example in Chapter 9, “Time in Experiential Space,” when discussing the effects of planning and setting goals on one’s experience of time and space. He explains, “Walking purposefully from A to B is felt as leaving so many steps behind and as having so much more ground ahead to cover,” towards a specific goal. (128)
 
However, Tuan gives us an interesting assertion regarding the effect that music can have on one’s experience of time and space, explaining, “Rhythmic sound that synchronizes with body movement cancels one’s sense of purposeful action, of moving through historical space and time toward a goal” (128).
 
This particular passage reminds me of my last job working at a daycare center on the Lower East Side. Twice a week I would make the trek down to Avenue D and Delancey St. Although the trip only took about a half hour, on especially rough or rainy days it wasn’t one I was too keen on taking. I found that listening to music would often make the routine trip feel shorter and easier to bear.
 
On days when my luck would run short and my iPod would die, I could feel a difference; the distance I was traveling, the time it was taking for me to get from point A to point B would rush back to my senses.
 
It’s as if the music erased my awareness of the outside world’s usual schemata of time and space and created a new framework centering on its rhythm and the “open and undifferentiated space” it created before me. I was suspended in a similar way to one traveling on a train or plane but felt no discomfort because, as Tuan explains, “[t]he idea of a precisely located goal loses relevance” as a result of the music. (128)
 
Tuan’s point on music connects to his later discussion of art – specifically of literature and sculpture – and its ability to “intimate experiences” and “incarnate personhood,” each of which lends to the creation of a sense of place. (162) Music is often used as a symbol and expression of human emotion and experience. It can create its own space and, eventually, a sense of place, in the same way that Tuan feels literary art or a sculpture can. In this way, a fellow walker bobbing his head to his iPod’s music could be in a completely separate place from you even if you are both standing on the same street corner, though let's hope he is aware enough of the outside world to watch for cars before crossing the street.

This week’s reading of Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place leads me back home, except this time it’s my current home. My whole life, I had been used to the hustle and bustle of suburbia, friendly next-door neighbors, and seeing familiar people and places wherever I went. My old house was a little small, but comfortable and full of fifteen years worth of my memories.
 
Moving into my new house was a huge adjustment; it’s significantly larger than my old house and located in a smaller development with a lot more distance and trees between houses. Instead of bagel shops or supermarkets, acres of farms and several older houses lie a couple of miles down the road. My town and my house are definitely not lacking in space.
 
In Chapter 5, “Spaciousness and Crowding,” Tuan complicates the meanings of these words, spending time to consider them in different contexts. Reading through the many angles at which he approaches these words to try and describe them made me realize how connected and complex these words are and how applicable their many meanings are in everyday life, including mine.
 
His discussion of “space” and “spaciousness” casts the terms and their corresponding ideas in a mostly positive light. When discussing spaciousness, he explains that it is “closely associated with the sense of being free” (52), and, later, that space is “worldwide a symbol of prestige” (58).
 
Coincidentally, it is largely for these reasons that my parents decided to move in the first place. Purchasing a more spacious house was a reflection of the success they had earned after emigrating from the Philippines and making their own lives here. Leaving behind our crowded suburban town for a peaceful rural one was especially important for my dad; the calm atmosphere reminded him of a specific place, his hometown in the Philippines.
 
Unfortunately, my siblings and I were not as excited as our parents to be moving out of the house in which we grew up. For us, there was too much space, especially between our house and places like the mall, the movies, or the houses of our friends. Personally, I missed the crowded, comfortable feeling of our hometown and especially that specific sense of place of our old home.
 
Perhaps that is part of the reason why I ended up in New York, back in the hustle and bustle of a much larger place surrounded by many more people; however, I still have the space I need for the freedom and opportunity I could not have found back at home, just as Tuan asserted (60). In this way, New York has become another special place for me, almost like another home.
 
But I will always return to my real home, to be surrounded by a different crowd. It's as Tuan described, “People crowd us but they can also enlarge our world. Heart and mind expand in the presence of those we admire and love” (64). And with a family like mine, where they are will always be my home.

When I was 15 years old, I moved out of my old house and into a new one about 20 miles away. On the day that we left, I said goodbye to our bare kitchen, our empty family room. I double-checked my room to make sure I hadn’t left anything. Then, I made my way to my parents’ room and into their walk-in closet lit by the midday sun shining through its only window. Its racks were naked of clothes. I was surprised it looked so small; when it had been filled to the brim with shoes and sweaters, dresses and the like back in my youth, it had seemed so large.
 
Many different-sized places were discussed in class and in Jennifer Cross' article; some were whole regions or countries, others specific houses and related spots to which people often connect on different levels. Although it may seem a little odd, when I read the first sentence of the assignment, I immediately thought of that walk-in closet, rather than of my hometown or even my childhood home as a whole. I think this may be because this room, out of all the other ones, was the embodiment of my childhood in that specific house in that specific town.
 
To both my town and my childhood home, I have – to use Cross’ terms – a biographical relationship. I had lived there for 15 years of my life and so had gotten to know the various people and places that defined my environment and, ultimately, my childhood. But I think it is the spiritual relationship I formed through this room that made it so important and influential for me.
 
It was in that walk-in closet that I explored my imagination with my siblings: climbing up shelves to look in boxes, diving behind the racks of clothes, and discovering new treasures hidden amongst the dozens of pairs of shoes. Many nights I would stay up late to finish “just one more chapter” (I would tell my parents) of a book. I would often sit in there to be alone and find some inspiration because even back then all I wanted to do was write, and that room cultivated that desire in me.
 
It was usually during these times that I would open the window and watch my neighbors ride by on their bikes, examine the clouds in the sky, listen to the chorus of lawn mowers, and smell the fresh cut grass. These moments forged that spiritual relationship and instilled in me that sense of belonging, that knowledge that suddenly appeared within my mind telling me that where I was then was exactly where I should be.
 
For me, at least, this place, this regular walk-in closet, is “a good place” because of the way it strings together my memories and forever ties me to my hometown, to my old house, and to the child I used to be.