Inadvertent interactions between people you see every day build a sense of community over time — the “sidewalk ballet”.
I always wondered what she would have thought about her ideas in the context of COVID.
>Joe Cornacchia, who keeps the delicatessen, usually has a dozen or so keys at a time for handing out like this. He has a special drawer for them.
>Now why do I, and many others, select Joe as a logical custodian for keys? Because we trust him, first, to be a respon sible custodian, but equally important because we know that he combines a feeling of good will with a feeling of no personal responsibility about our private affairs. Joe considers it no con cern of his whom we choose to permit in our places and why. Around on the other side of our block, people leave their keys at a Spanish grocery. On the other side of Joe's block, people leave them at the candy store. Down a block they leave them at the coffee shop, and a few hundred feet around the corner from that, in a barber shop. Around one corner from two fashionable blocks of town houses and apartments in the Upper East Side, people leave their keys in a butcher shop and a bookshop; around another corner they leave them in a cleaner's and a drug store.
>In unfashionable East Harlem keys are left with at least one florist, in bakeries, in luncheonettes, in Spanish and Italian groceries.
And over the course of our 6 week stay, we definitely ate at that pizza shop a few times!
Seems strange to me, I've never done anything of the sort and wouldn't consider it. The closest is maybe leaving things at school for another parent to pickup because they left them with my kid.
If the person had a history at denying the keys at random for no good reason, people wouldn't trust them with the keys anymore.
Anyway, it's way more likely that they would call the home owner instead of just denying. People are mostly reasonable.
People recently voted Trump into office.
I paid the money, give me the key. Plus at no point did I pay them any money -- they're just, essentially, key escrow.
It's good marketing for them since being in and out of a pizza place means someone will likely buy a slice, but as a BnB customer IDGAF what they think outside of giving me that bloody key.
> with a feeling of no personal responsibility about our private affairs
where i live now differs so that phenomenon doesn’t exist here.
This is what my suburb looks like:
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9014246,-87.791197,3a,75y,17...
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9301849,-87.7195955,3a,75y,3...
The front yard space and number of driveways in the Oak Park link also stuck out to me.
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7099143,-87.6801127,3a,75y,1...
This is really what most of Chicago looks like (modulo economic conditions in the different neighborhoods --- they're not all this upscale). It's a city of neighborhoods. Most of the streetscapes that jump to mind about Chicago, if you don't live here, are places people basically don't live.
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9405345,-87.6750174,3a,75y,2...
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9403868,-87.6590203,3a,75y,3...
wiki, use translator: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wichlinghausen-S%C3%BCd Maps overview with borders highlighted: https://maps.app.goo.gl/fvr34T8JbLEVQLAF8 Street view of a normal street there; though I recommend 3D view for a better understanding: https://maps.app.goo.gl/QXEGChFvHciAq8Va8?g_st=ac
This is btw. 2.9x as dense as Oak Park, IL.
Note that 41k live in the Loop and 27k live in Jefferson Park.
Maybe if you sample by area, places look more suburban than stereotypical cities, but by population, lots of people live in the dense parts.
100k in the Near North Side, which I think is basically a “downtown” streetscape.
And of course many in the in-between density neighborhoods (eg 71k in Logan Square).
Source:
I moved from a denser part of Bridgeport, so it definitely has been an adjustment (particularly in variety). But even some areas of Bridgeport, which is much closer to downtown, had pockets that are equivalently walkable to where I'm at now, or maybe even less so. Anyone surprised to see SFHs and front yards in Chicago probably hasn't ventured far out of downtown/a handful of North Side neighborhoods.
https://www.seattle.gov/neighborhoods/public-participation/e...
Edit - sibling comment indicates Seattle has something similar.
This is entirely arbitrary and knowing whether a particular place is technically part of "the city" doesn't really tell you anything about it. As you might expect, this causes a ton of unnecessary confusion.
[0] Part of Kansas City proper: https://maps.app.goo.gl/9B9rhVzAtSykLhUs5
[1] "St. Louis" but not part of St. Louis proper: https://maps.app.goo.gl/xXM7A2fQYY2Kh3vY6
> Nobody I know would call that street the city. In my mind, "the city" is, minimally, houses that are a few feet apart, small yard in back/front, pretty much nothing on the side. Frequently, it's 2-3 story buildings, with whole floors rented out as an apartment. That's my "least dense" vision of a city. Anything less than that (ie, full yards) falls into my vision of suburb.
They almost never clarify. What they do is produce silly arguments like this one.
Define people?
When most people I know say suburb they mean this: You're far enough the urban core that you probably have to drive to get to shops and jobs, but close enough to the urban core that you don't pass through farmland to get there. Some suburbs are like what you describe, but most are exactly like what OP links to.
I'm not at all sure what the utility is of a using a definition of suburb that excludes most of the not-high-density but not-rural US and only counts the absolute worst-designed spaces. It just means we're all talking past each other, with some of us saying "not all suburbs are terrible" and others insisting that suburbs are by definition terrible and anything that isn't terrible isn't a suburb. It's a bit of a True Scotsman fallacy and doesn't make for very useful dialog.
> Some suburbs are like what you describe, but most are exactly like what OP links to.
Without defining what constitutes a suburb, how can you argue that most are good? Your argument hinges on your own definition of suburb IMHO.
I’m not sure what the right answer is, but in my experience most people mean post-war development patterns when they talk about suburbs, but in any case it probably doesn’t hurt to be more precise about what we are praising or criticizing.
> You're far enough the urban core that you probably have to drive to get to shops and jobs, but close enough to the urban core that you don't pass through farmland to get there.
Since my definition is broader it's less susceptible to NTS fallacies. What you identify as a suburb is a suburb but it is not all suburbs.
> but in my experience most people mean post-war development patterns when they talk about suburbs
Even this is too broad to sweepingly say all suburbs are bad. I've lived in 5 different suburban neighborhoods as an adult, 4 of which were developed post-war, and all had sidewalks and plenty of walking around and neighborly interaction.
And, seriously, who cares? Why would you want your argument to die on this hill? What could it possibly matter?
Did you read me as disagreeing with you, or did I misunderstand and you were trying to say that Oak Park isn't a suburb? Or is Oak Park actually within walking distance of "the city" as Chicagoans would identify it?
In any case, I think there are multiple valid definitions for suburb—one which talks about smaller towns on the periphery of large cities and another which emphasizes postwar design principles/philosophies. I don’t see the point in arguing for a single true definition; language doesn’t work that way.
Clearly the author of TFA believed that this was the definition of suburb, because they were clearly thinking of a space where people could in fact just hang out in front of their houses and meet neighbors. So for the purpose of this conversation, this definition of suburb is the only one that makes sense.
My thing since I moved houses a couple years ago is just hanging out on the porch, and I'm probably just going to start telling people when I'm going to be out there and inviting everyone to just come over.
It's like pretending downtown Evanston is a suburb of Chicago.
(shh don't tell anybody i said that)
That being said, we did have this sorta thing on my block during covid times (once ppl stopped caring abt the social distancing and mask nonsense) but then the main families that did this moved away to bigger houses (as their families grew) and now it’s basically dead as there wasn’t a lot of intention behind it like the OP clearly has.
Quickly figured out that power was out and the weird sound was neighbors sitting on their front stoop talking.
Many homes are designed such that the inhabitants rarely use the front door, using only the garage.
A lot of "suburbs" in the Midwest lack sidewalks -- you can have the cops roll on you if you try to walk anywhere.
There is a close connection between urban architecture and whether or not community building can take place, and sadly, many places are not like it.
Kunstler's TED talk is a fantastic way to become more aware of that topic: https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_the_ghastly_...
His thesis is some of the US must be torn down to rebuild it in a friendlier community-enabling way.
Curiously, to the OP's "stoop coffee" topic, he already recognized the communicative potential/value of the space in front of houses, and he points out that old European cities "got that right" (and having a central market square, too).
This has not been my experience in the surburbs. A typical suburban home has both spaces: a front yard/patio and a back yard/patio. If anything the physical constraints are substantially more conducive to hanging out out front than what I'm seeing in these photos here—people in the suburbs have some amount of space that they actually own in front of their home, they don't have to occupy the sidewalk.
As OP said, which one people choose to use depends on the personality of the individual, not the layout of the space. For example: our last four homes, like every home in each neighborhood, have had both, and I always prefer to be out back while my wife loves being out front interacting with the neighbors as they walk by (which, yes, they have regularly done in all four neighborhoods!).
In my experience, you're far more likely to see kids biking/wandering around neighborhoods in the suburbs than in the city. This is the reason why people want things like cul-de-sacs, because eliminating through traffic means that people are able to use the area much more freely without having to worry about cars.
This doesn't match my personal experience, at all. Even the cutest and most pedestrian friendly suburbs have far less walking than typical cities, with faster more dangerous traffic, and less infrastructure for alternative modes of travel.
> far more likely to see kids biking/wandering around neighborhoods in the suburbs than in the city
This also doesn't come close to matching my personal experience (though it does match many people's inaccurate stereotypes, which I have heard repeatedly in conversations with people who don't live in cities). There are tons of kids and families around in cities.
> eliminating through traffic means that people are able to use the area much more freely
Quite the opposite. Cul-de-sacs cut places off from easy pedestrian access and make it usually significantly more difficult and dangerous to get anywhere by walking, because to get to destinations requires crossing massive (sometimes 6–10 lane) quasi-highways with high-speed traffic. Such places typically also come with separated residential and commercial zones and few useful destinations nearby: not as many schools, museums, libraries, parks, coffee shops, restaurants, retail stores, etc. within a reasonable distance, and lower population density with much more pavement per person. The predicable result is that in most places with many cul-de-sacs hardly any trips are made on foot or bike and people end up driving everywhere. Public transit also tends to suck in places with cul-de-sacs everywhere.
I run into the opposite problem - people who grew up in the suburbs, move into gentrifying city neighborhoods as adults, and who carry idealized view of the city they moved to, will often accuse others - even people who have lived in the city there entire life - of being an outsider if they don't hold the same idealized view.
Judging by how shocked this type of person often gets when I tell them I was born and raised here ("You from here? 'Here' here? Wow, that's pretty rare!"), I get the impression that many of these people live in a bit of a gentrification bubble. Which is fine, but it would be nice if they were aware that there was much more to the city than the gentrification bubble (including people who have lived here far longer than them, sometimes for generations).
Anyway, you'll notice I never claimed there weren't "tons of kids and families around in cities," but rather that seeing kids roaming around neighborhoods on their own was more common in the suburbs than the city (at least based on my personal experience).
> Cul-de-sacs cut places off from easy pedestrian access and make it usually significantly more difficult and dangerous to get anywhere by walking, because to get to destinations requires crossing massive (sometimes 6–10 lane) quasi-highways with high-speed traffic.
This is a non-sequitur. I already mentioned in my post that in the suburbs it's more difficult to get to commercial destinations. That doesn't change the fact that a cul-de-sac is an area with little traffic, that most suburban developments/neighborhoods have pretty light traffic, and that you're typically going to encounter very little traffic inside these developments/neighborhoods.
Having lived in both, this is just categorically untrue.
Cities are filled with pedestrians and cyclists. Both recreationally and for practical purposes. In a given hour I might see over a hundred pedestrians outside my window and perhaps twenty cyclists. This would be an order of magnitude higher if I was on a commercial corridor or actually busy street.
In contrast you might see ten pedestrians a day in most parts of the suburbs. And maybe one or two cyclists, unless you leave your neighborhood.
Suburbs also have far worse traffic. City streets have small roads and slow-moving vehicles. Suburbs have giant thoroughfares and fast-moving vehicles. As a pedestrian and cyclists, I know which of the two I’d rather be in.
I'd heavily agree with the idea that my suburban experience is that I do not know my neighbours, and the only time I've known them has been for bad reasons (harassment, fencing disputes etc.). In the inner city, I may not know my neighbours, but you probably know and interact with your general community in public spaces a lot more than the suburbs, mainly because you don't get everywhere by car. The small coffee shop on every corner in the gentrified inner city where people wait on the path for their coffee is a bit reminiscent (to a lesser degree) of the "stoop coffee" idea. That experience in the suburbs only really exists through your children (i.e. via schools and sports clubs) and doesn't exist much for child-free people.
With growing high density development near train stations in the suburbs, there is a bit more of this experience further from the city center. However it is really limited to a few square kilometers of urbanism and apartment living that then gives way to endless free standing houses and car dependent suburbia.
If some people here think that a suburb has to be the absolute worst stereotype of NIMBY living to count as a suburb and others are talking about anything with detached single family homes and yards, we're having very very different conversations. It seems more useful to work with the definition of suburb that simply means "outside the urban core".
Even the definition of "outside the urban core" is hard to pin down; I'm pretty sure you could get disagreement on whether where I live is within the urban core or not.
Yes, counterexamples exist. But the vast majority of American suburbia is quite like what you describe: isolated homes with very low density where the only way to get to anything you’d want to do is drive, even within the neighborhood!
I don’t have a front yard in my home in the city. But I do have a million things outside my front door. So I walk to them, and I see and meet neighbors along the way.
I walk my dog and meet neighbors who are sitting outside their houses. I also sit outside my house and meet neighbors who are out walking their dogs or just out for a stroll.
When I've spent time in big cities I simply don't see this, because there aren't good places to walk dogs and it's generally unpleasant to just be out in the street for the sake of it.
The idea that all suburbs are isolated nightmarish hellscapes of pavement and car accidents is some combination of a myth spread by city dwellers and a minority experience in a few types of McMansion housing developments.
Sure, but they are a lot more setup for walking dogs and casual walks and bike rides with your family and friends. The version of stoop coffee in my neighborhood is people walking their dogs and then stopping to chat. That and leaning on their fence talking to their neighbors.
well, there's also security, physical containment of your pet/children.
I think of Frost's "Good fences make good neighbors"
These houses have narrow lots, a porch right up to the sidewalk, and are on narrow streets. Newer neighbourhoods don't have that magic combination - even when the lots are narrow and there is no garage in the front, there is always a setback, a useless front yard, and more often than not no porch (or a "vestigial" porch that's too shallow to use comfortably).
Editing to add: The old neighborhoods are nearly always on a grid of streets, where every street has passers by. Newer neighbourhoods will have hierarchical streets that include crescents and cul de sacs, which connect to nothing and have nobody just passing through (although that does seem to be changing in the newest neighbourhoods).
I don't have a dog though.
In densely populated cities, you are often in close proximity with other humans you haven't met yet. But there can be social and cultural norms to keep walking and avoid eye contact because social interaction with all the countless people you pass is completely impractical.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AoNuz1gjQo
So both environments have their challenges for impromptu social interactions.