A Convenience Truth

When I moved to the city, the idea was, as urban-planning professionals keep telling us, that the clustering of services and housing for the many on a condensed footprint is the rational way to live. I guess that I interpreted this concept as convenience. A dense neighborhood, close to amenities – how could that be bad? The city neighborhood we chose to inhabit, at that time, was down on its luck (otherwise, how could we have afforded it?), but it was convenient: to transportation, to supermarkets, to the downtown center (only six miles) and to the most natural portion of the municipal park system. It seemed to have it all. We could walk to two supermarkets, never mind that the closest of the two never had anything besides toilet paper that we were looking for and the other, a mile’s walk one way, had possibly three things that we wanted.

There were two shopping district streets about a half-mile or less walk, one up the hill from our street and the other down. The upper one was quaint, sort of behind the times, but it had services like hardware stores, banks, real-estate offices with notaries, a card shop, shoe stores, etc. The lower one was on the skids, with many boarded-up storefronts, too many bars, a plumbing supply and a roofing supply. But a new wave of people saw opportunity there, and some trendy restaurants opened and, eventually, they were followed by antiques, boutiques, galleries and designer-kitchen shops. It was new and exciting, at first, to see life where there had been cobwebs, but the downside was twofold. As the lower street gentrified, it killed off the upper street, which now looks as shantytown-ish as the latter had been before its makeover. And, because of the trendiness factor, people came from everywhere to see the lower street and, as a result,  more and more restaurants and bars opened – more expensive versions of what had been. The clientele kept getting younger and younger, and drank more and more. Some of the restaurants gave way to bars, and the whole street became a college-student drinking mall. More students, more cars. A 19th-century mill town became an SUV parking lot, and all the barflies ended up drunk and disorderly on the streets at 2 am. Not terribly convenient.

One appeal of this neighborhood is that it had some greenspace left, unlike some of the other residential areas in the city. That was probably because of the neighborhood’s topography of steep hills, rendering some sites difficult to put a structure on. Not anymore. Now every scrap of open land, no matter the slope or narrowness or absurdity of building upon it, either has been or is being built on. In addition to the number of vehicles reducing two-lane streets to one, the number of houses are choking the life out of the blocks and making the same damn canyons that kept us from choosing other neighborhoods over this one. Very inconvenient.

When I go downtown into the city’s center, I notice very nice houses, cheek to jowl (well, they are rowhouses), now with 20-story high-rises built right next door, and where open space means having a parking lot with a hundred cars in it at any given time. Because of a lack of yards, often these houses will have decks on their second or third floors. Of course, the sky is open but everything else feels so confining, surrounded by building facades, backs of restaurants and their Dumpsters and exhaust fans, or the exquisite view of blacktop and cars that resembles the shipping port’s cargo holding lots. Yes, owners can walk to a number of amenities from such houses, but do they? Or do they feel as prisoners in their lofty towers? I feel a bit imprisoned in my house; not that I am afraid but, rather, it is uncomfortable to be outside among the whooping denizens.

I think that one has to give up many lifestyle conveniences to live conveniently. There are so many tradeoffs. What is convenient about having to have bars on your doors and windows? Or to live in a cloud of exhaust fumes day in, day out? Or to hear the incessant sounds of humans and machines without respite?

We have recently decided to live in a more rural town. We haven’t made the physical move yet, but the process of weighing and comparisons are inevitable. In a more sparsely populated area, the conveniences are fewer but so are the inconveniences of civilization. Being able to breathe – not only spatially, but to inhale the scent of pine, wood fires, rushing creeks and mountain air. These are conveniences, too. Watching bunnies play, having wild turkeys poke around in the meadow, listening to the sound of the stream and, at first, thinking that its whooshing sound is that of a highway but, no, it is water! These are not the usual conveniences we are taught to appreciate, but these are the ones we instantly, instinctually respond to; we just don’t think of them as conveniences, merely nature. And then there is the very real convenience of feeling like you can go outside on your own property and not be stepping on someone else’s turf, or even having to look at or hear someone else’s assertion of his or her presence. Yes, there are neighbors, but they are both near and far, not so close that you can’t escape them. And if you want to rub elbows with others, walk a few blocks into the town center, but leave it behind when you have quenched your thirst.

Convenience can have many meanings, I am beginning to see. Maybe it can also be a state of not having so much within your reach; enough but not over-the-top too much, and having the convenience of savoring the moment.

Parking Place

Old cities are being suffocated by cars. And I am not just talking about the huge volume of traffic flow. When a city such as ours – built in the 18th century for horses and carriages, and which then expanded, in the 19th century, with modern public conveyances like trolleys, an elevated line, subway and trains – has its 21st-century residents hell-bent on having a four-wheeled vehicle per capita … well, where are they all supposed to go? America is big, but cities have limits. Especially old cities. For a time, in the 20th century in this city, there was a belief that the resident of each house had an unofficial ownership of the space right in front of his/her property, for the purpose of parking. At that time, there was usually just one car per household. Now, it is per adult.

Certainly, for an 18th-century rowhouse, nothing but a Smart car would fit across its breadth. But, even for 19th-century rowhouses, most cars are longer than the distance between party walls. And if you put four to six people of driving age in one rowhouse … well, their four to six cars will take up the entire block. It is a mathematical thing and a spatial thing. And, usually, a rental thing.

What’s a neighborhood to do, especially those permanent residents who leave for work and return in the evening to find no parking spaces on their entire block, possibly for several blocks? Students, sometimes six to a house, have had their vehicles parked most of the day, since they have only one class to go to, and a big SUV to get them to and from it. The scarcity of street parking was making it difficult for homeowners to live here, the curbside space was bursting at the seams. Finally, someone in our neighborhood did something about it: permit parking.

Recently, I awoke to the sound of drilling, and within an hour or two, there was a fence-post-like array of street signage up and down our three contiguous blocks, on the curb-parking side. “2 HR Parking 8 am – 6:30 pm, Mon thru Fri, Except Permit Parking 15.” Additionally, “No Stopping Anytime” signs were placed at a certain distance from the corners. This is a so-full-up area that every conceivable space is used, including sidewalks, if they are not cordoned off in some manner. I look out my windows now, and through the trees I view full-frontal red, white and green signs. And they are large. The funny thing is, though, that most of the difficult parking is at night, not between 8 am and 6:30 pm. But maybe the idea is that the hour or so at the tail end of the “controlled time” is enough to give the permanent residents a chance at a space, if they move quickly. Although, if someone was clever, they could begin parking their non-permitted car at 4:30 pm and be good to go for the night.

My straight-across-the-street neighbor came home one night, after the signs were installed, and said, “Yippee, I can park right in front of my house again!” I asked if he had obtained a permit and he said that he had, and that it cost only $35. Many of the students renting on our street have out-of-state plates and I wonder if they can obtain a permit. Maybe that is the point. Otherwise, it is just a small reminder that they don’t control these blocks. To me, this is more of the theater of city life. I and a few of the residents on our side of the street have driveways – a luxury item in these mean streets. So, the advent of permit parking doesn’t affect us one way or the other. Obviously, it pissed off a number of residents enough to make them happy to pay for the likelihood of a parking space.

Suddenly, a few months into this, someone came out and changed the signs to, “2 HR Parking, 7 pm – 7 am, Mon thru Sun.” Obviously somebody figured out the uselessness of the original timeframe.

I can’t say I enjoy looking at all the signage, nor do I enjoy looking at all the cars lined up nose to butt with about four inches between, resembling metallic sausage links. From space, the parked cars solidly lining the steep hilly streets must look like multicolored guardrails, or some sort of low-cost version of housing.

So, where is the placeness of neighborhoods if they become parking lots? You might think that any new housing that appears would have to confront and solve the problem of parking, or, at least, not contribute to it. Somehow on our street, three new houses were built on a lot big enough for one and, yes, they have garages. Unfortunately, the garages are not big enough for the new owners’ cars. So the result is that there are now seven additional cars seeking spaces. And the space required for the seven cars is, by measurement, greater than the space that the three houses inhabit. And so it goes. 

Where does it end? In New York City there are these parking elevators that stack cars up several stories high in a confined area, maximizing air-space parking on a small footprint of land. Also in NYC, there are high-end apartment buildings with indoor parking – right on your own floor! Here’s a thought: When the cities get maxed out, hire big-wheeler auto-transport trucks to carry muliple vehicles around and around, circling through the city streets until they are called or texted to bring the car to your door. A new kind of carryout. The streets would be clear but the diesel fumes would kill everyone, so there would be no need for cars anymore. And no need for permit parking in residential neighborhoods – since there would be no residents.

Place Settings

In pondering many of life’s unanswerables, the one that keeps goading me, keeps unsettling me is the one about being in the right place. There are so many variables about where one is and why: were you born there; did you find an employment that brought you there; is your family network close by or, intentionally, not; did you arrive by way of a breakdown or breakup and never left; did you connect with someone and stayed; were you on a quest and, partially or wholly satisfied, remained; were you proactive or did you go with the flow or was it merely inertia? And do you ever think about these things or is it just a given, like the way you look or the sun setting westward?

If so, did you build a life, a life that can sustain you for the rest of it? I mean, besides travel, are you completely content with your locale? Is it an easy, comfortable place to be, or a stimulating one, or is it intolerable? Or is it just here. And now. And that’s all there is. When it comes time to vacate this place, will you do so because of a desire for a particular climate, proximity to slot machines, low taxes, nearness of family, cultural benefits, medical facilities, or a beautiful environment; how about a like-minded community? Or will you be carried out in a box? Will you even have a choice?

It is a puzzle: should I stay or should I go? Can one place be suitable for a lifetime, for a person’s changing needs or desires? I remember my father, who was born, bred, schooled and wed, then fathered, worked, lived and died within about a three-mile radius. He did some traveling, but he told me that there was only one other place besides home that he would have ever considered living – Washington, DC. I found that peculiar, since to me it has felt like a static open-air museum, or mausoleum, with a dash of the kind of yawn-inducing ambience of a state capitol. I’ll grant that some of the architecture is prettier than the average state seat, but the oppressive, imposed grandeur and order is reminiscent of right-wing police states and L’Enfant’s design penchant for creating space for marching hoards. Well, my dad was Prussian/German. The weird thing was that, during his funeral, we caravanned from parlor to cemetery – a distance of 2.8 miles – and passed en route every touchstone of his life. It was a remarkable tribute. Not a planned one; it just so happened that living or dead, this was the road he traveled. It was a neat, nearly straight south-north line from cradle to grave.

I have had, up to this point, more of a zigzag approach. I have now lived about as long in one place not of my birth as I did in my hometown, with multiple stops in between, mostly back and forth in an east-west orientation. As I consider the future, should there be one, I wonder: Is this still the place for it? Could there be a better place to live that is more attuned to the person I am now as opposed to the person I was a quarter century ago? I am a firm believer in there being many lifetimes in a lifetime. What should the next one be? And where should it be?

For me, there has never been an option of returning to the source – it is from whence I came, not where I want to be. That would be like trying to relive the past, and a past is not what I seek. It is the moving forward that beckons. And, too, I can safely eliminate Washington as a possibility. But where? I have been to many compelling places, largely cities, but it is not the city life I am craving now. I look at rural areas, and there is beauty in the land, but it might be isolating and lonely. What’s left is a small town. I think I have often imagined living in a village but not one with a cannon in the center square and, similarly, not one where the sense of self is based on some event that happened three centuries ago – meaning that the town and its identity do not dwell in the past. History is fine, but not as a way of life.

So the quest is to find a place, one that others with equal values have found before and have sustained or built upon, sharing the same interest in moving forward and making the most of every day, being creative and celebrating individuality and a passion for life, as opposed to sleepwalking through it. Where is such a place?

The Small Street

You turn the corner and walk into the small street, and everything changes. You are only, then, a few steps in from the wide, bustling multilane road – and you are still, of course, in the city, in the very center of its downtown area – and, yet, you are immediately in a place apart … or, perhaps, actually at the core of the silent but insistently beating heart that truly propels a city. It is the beat that you can feel, if you try, under the quotidian rumble and buzz. The quiet places, not the teeming boulevards, are what make great cities great; what soothes a soul is not the lively place you’re in but knowing that there’s a hushed place where  you can go.

There is something about a small city street. It is, elementally, little different from its larger siblings: cement and asphalt, brick and wood and glass, buildings and path. And, in an old city like this, built without plan: one kind of house cheek to jowl with one so unlike it, sometimes in gross ways, sometimes subtle. Constructed by different people at different times, with different desires and different ideas about what a city should be and what a street ought to contain.

No city can be great without great little streets. Metropolises that have decimated the twisty, ancient parts of their downtowns to build superblocks, cities that have been designed or refashioned with the automobile in mind, suburbs that were devised with car-rivers but no pedestrian tributaries – all these have traded humanity for expedience, and made life more barren, and certainly less stimulating. Each large gesture needs a small one to be seen as such, and vice versa; one without the other creates an imbalance.

For example, this little street you have just entered. It is one block long – an entry at one end, a dead end at the other, with high rises jutting up and above a short distance beyond. Houses line one side; garage doors and the backs of houses from an adjacent street make up the other. Not one house looks like the other, and not one of them dates back to the time in the 1800s when this street was laid out – so, it is not history, per se, that gives this street, with its poking-up cobblestones, its strong sense of place. Two of the houses are Modernist – one inexplicably, idiosyncratically and beautifully so – another is a latterly reimagined carriage house; there are only 4 or 5 residences on this street. Each house was planned, but as a collective there was no overriding plan or aesthetic. Intention and accident, artfulness and artlessness, cognizance of neighbor yet selfishness of taste and vision, disparate elements creating a totality that is somehow unified in its distinct placeness — that is what art is.

You can never remember this little street’s name, if you ever knew it, and sometimes you can’t recall how to find your way here, but you can’t forget how it makes you feel when you find it: private and public, privileged and interloping, inwardly reflective yet outwardly attuned, explorer and castaway. City dweller, at least for the moment.

Then you walk back to the busy byway, put 100 feet or so between you and that little street, and as it begins to slip into the past … oh, look: another one. Let’s enter this place, too, and see who we are in it.