by Nathaniel Popkin
May 2, 2007
I'd like to think about the colors of the suburbs. Green grass, and at this time of year, in this part of the world, white dogwoods, pick azaleas,
chocolate
mulch, tar black macadam. Fences, long driveways, basketball hoops: privacy foremost and over all. Land -- just enough -- to arrange and rearrange,
live in
and dig around. Your house is your world -- and no one can step into it unless you allow her.
It is a cherished way of life. But what if we transfer it to another country?
For the sake of simplicity, we'll choose our evil eighteenth century twin, France. France is full of suburbs. Some are really high-density housing
projects. They're suburban only because they're outside the historic landscape of the city. They're islands filled mostly with African immigrants.
Let's
put those aside and speak instead of the places the French flee to when they've tired of the grind of Paris, Bordeaux, and Marseille. What do we find
there?
Small houses with stone walls and gardens, sure. Big box stores, yes, those too. But how about huge transit junctions, dense and often large historic
villages with integrated contemporary public facilities and busy sidewalks, concrete Modernist housing developments, and gipsy enclaves. Suburban by
the
definition of French culture, but in so many ways these places are more urban than Phoenix, Houston, or Atlanta.
In other words, they don't get it. (Mike Zuckerman, professor of history at Penn, told me once about a group of students who came to Philadelphia from
Tokyo. He happily dragged them back and forth across Philadelphia, recounting the splendors, as only he can tell them, of our city. Only when he was
through did he realize that the urban joys of Philadelphia could never compete with Tokyo. Instead, if he had really wanted to impress them, he should
have
taken them to the suburbs to have them witness the perfection and peculiarity of our civilization.)
And we, as Mike realized, with our suburban genes and famous private instinct, don't really understand the ambition of the city. We're conditioned to
control everything and fear what we don't understand. We'll do anything to be comfortable. The street -- the public city -- belies these tendencies.
Things are changing in Franklin's city. I've lived here twenty years. Never in those two decades has the place seemed more alive. Never before has
it even
approached the wide, cosmopolitan -- nearly bustling -- ideal. What's more, we're taking joy in city life. And yet, probably for this newfound
intensity,
we're exposing the limits of our physiology. Here in the quietest city in the world, we're making too much noise.
Two weeks ago, the Bean Exchange opened across the street. Owner Matt Armstrong took two long years to convert the corner of Seventh and Bainbridge
into the
new old world. Bean Exchange finally opened on a cold, grim April morning. Only within days this house of espresso became the hot, oozing center of
Bella
Vista life. The tables inside and out have been filled day and night. Matt's voice booms from the corner -- his is the first I hear in the morning --
and
music, chatter, laughter follows. But within a few days of opening, the predictable happened: some neighbors across the street began to quietly
complain
about the late night noise. Matt agreed immediately to bring the tables inside after nine o'clock. He has no intention of being an ugly neighbor.
There isn't much he could do anyway. Rowhouse streets trap and amplify sound -- and the scale of the buildings is too small, the sidewalk and street
too
narrow, the ratio of homeowners to renters too high. The street, therefore, isn't anonymous. It's owned, claimed, accounted for. Thus each of us can
tell
Matt what to do.
Returning to France, let's take a Parisian corner similar in location to mine at Seventh and Bainbridge. We'll shrink the street dimensions and grow
the
buildings two stories to fit the medieval scale. Now let's try to imagine someone living on the third floor of a building on the Place du
Marché St.
Catherine, for example, telling the café owner opposite what time to turn down the music. It's just not fathomable.
Yet here in Philadelphia, not only can neighbors dictate a café owner's hours (by the way, given our form of government and building scale, this
kind
of control makes potentially for a richer form of democracy), but the police at the encouragement of certain neighbors have found fit to ban
spontaneous live
music from our busiest and most cherished public square, Rittenhouse. Thinking this all the way through, it's no more fathomable that the gendarmes
would arrest a busker or lover
playing
the mandolin in the Place de Vosges than it is to imagine a neighbor on the third floor bullying the café owner to take in his tables by
nine.
Nevertheless, despite the rampant irony of this move, this fine spring you will be advised against the playing of even a harp while sitting on a blanket with
children
dancing around you. The biddies of the square have deemed that a threat to public order. For it surely can't be noise they are concerned with. Most
residents of Rittenhouse Square live well above the street level in climate-controlled apartments. If this is really an action against intolerable
noise
then I can assure you these terrified ladies would be out carrying placards against the sound of the diesel backhoes and other equipment being used to
build
more new condos, against the burning squeal of the five Septa bus lines that traverse Walnut Street day and night, against the idling engines of the
Hummer
limousines, against the beep-beep-beep of the reversing trucks making deliveries to Rouge and the Devon Grill.
No: this maneuver is about ignorance and control. The true irony here is that Philadelphia's rowhouse physiology makes it uniquely susceptible to
uncivilized behavior: when properties are left to decline and trash is tossed out a car window, when snow and ice are left unshoveled, when car alarms
and
revving motorcycles and gunfire ring the night, everyone on the block suffers. This city turns quickly downcast and miserable. You want to -- but
can't --
assert some control.
Rittenhouse Square, the one place of grand and impersonal scale, ought to be immune from this kind of worry. It ought, therefore, to exist above the
fray of
private meddling. Maybe that's why this story strikes me as so sad. Rittenhouse is our one chance to flaunt our urbanity, to live, as I wrote on these
pages
before, unabashedly in public, to be a bit more Paris and a little less Cherry Hill.
Last week we decided we might as well be a little less Marrakech and little more Singapore. Citing an obscure three-decade old law banning such
amusement,
L&I shut down all the palm reading madams it could find. This may or may not be a big deal. I've never had my palm read, here or in Sea Isle City for
that
matter, so I can't really say. Only there are a few of these ladies who watch TV and read the cards all day -- in that order -- who live in my
neighborhood.
Why single them out? Because they are "con artists capable of stealing large sums -- even life savings -- from grieving or otherwise vulnerable
people,"
says L&I official Domenic Verdi in the Inquirer. It's funny but I don't see L&I cracking down on religious institutions. Didn't religion coin the term prey?
I'm sorry to have let this go there. B Love, sounding just as flummoxed and despondent, equates these recent and irrational measures to the removal of
skateboarders from Love Park. Why? he wonders. The sad answer: it's our S(uburban) genes. We can't help it: it colors everything.
So, lovers of city life, watch out. Stoop parties are next. There's some old regulation somewhere.
Prohibited: Enlivening the sidewalk, or something.
nrpopkin@gmail.com
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