Good magazine included Burlington’s Five Sisters on its list of five “of the nation’s (in)famous neighborhoods” (Spring 2010, p. 43). It’s a bit silly… the breakdown…
Five Sisters, Burlington, Vermont
- AKA: South End
- Archetypal architecture: Cap Cods, foursquares, stone bungalows, lots of porches
- Preferred community event: appreciating nature
- Claim to fame: beards, color-changing leaves
- Notable residents: Ted Bundy, Howard Dean (or, the Five Sisters environs)
- Kindred spirit: Whitaker, Eugene, Oregon; all of Boulder, Colorado
Also, in “What’s in a Name?” on page 48…
Named because the five main streets in the area — Catherine, Caroline, Margaret, Charlotte, and Marian — were named for the daughters of the developer.
Not true, if I recall from past Front Porch Forum postings. But fun, nonetheless.
From the Christian Science Monitor… “The front porch wins converts as chatting with neighbors and watching storms brings connection.” After hosting visitors on their front porch during a thunderstorm, the author quotes his friend…
“You know, we’ve lived in our house for more than 20 years and you just talked to your neighbors more in that 15 minutes than we have in the whole time we’ve lived there.”
Such is the enchantment of front porches and swings.
Read the whole piece… you’ll be glad you did.
My family’s front porch is the same way… it’s the one pictured here.
I’m looking forward to reading the just published book, In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time. From the author…
Peter Lovenheim had lived on the same street in suburban Rochester, New York much of his life. But it was only after a brutal murder-suicide rocked the neighborhood that he was struck by a fact of modern life in contemporary American communities: No one really knew anyone else.
Thus began Peter’s search to meet and get to know his neighbors. Being inquisitive, he did more than just introduce himself. He asked, ever so politely, if he could sleep over.
With an open mind and a curious spirit, Lovenheim takes us inside the homes, minds, and hearts of his neighbors and asks a thought-provoking question: Do neighborhoods still matter—and is something lost when we live as strangers next door?
Lovenheim also just published a short piece on Parade.com. Here’s a snippet…
When Jodi Lee, a librarian, bought a home in 2004 near downtown Columbus, Ohio, neighbors told her about “Wednesdays on the Porch.” From the first week after Memorial Day through early fall, residents take turns hosting a weekly porch party for their neighbors. It is a way to get to know one another, exchange information, and keep in touch. Jodi was encouraged to host one. She followed the advice and, a few weeks later, on her own front porch, met her neighbor Bill Sieloff. Four years later, he became her husband. “The wedding was almost like a Wednesday on the Porch,” Jodi recalls, “so many neighbors were there.”
Doug Motz, one of the founders, estimates that since these Wednesdays began eight years ago, about 75 different families have held more than 130 porch parties in the neighborhood. “It’s a time for sharing—opinions on new restaurants, how to find good painters and home-repair people—but it’s primarily social,” Motz says. “And the nice thing is, the hosts don’t have to worry about cleaning up inside.”
New traditions like this are a welcome exception to the trend favoring privacy over community, which goes back to the post–World War II flight to the suburbs. According to social scientists, neighborhood ties today are less than half as strong as they were in the 1950s. Recently, the trend has accelerated with suburban “McMansions,” huge houses set back from wide streets with big backyards that further isolate neighbors from one another.
Congratulations to SeeClickFix.com (from the New Haven Register)…
YARDLEY, Pa. — Journal Register Co., a multimedia company in local news and information and parent company of the New Haven Register, announced Tuesday a major citizen journalism initiative in conjunction with New Haven-based SeeClickFix and that company’s unique program to empower citizens to improve their communities.
Starting immediately, all 18 of Journal Register Co.’s daily newspapers and online publications in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Michigan and Ohio are partnering with www.SeeClickFix.com in the communities they serve…
UPDATE: More about SCF, as well as Everyblock and Outside.in.
My wife shared a book from 1997 with me this week, and the following passage jumped out at me. It’s from Common Purpose: Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America by Lisbeth B. Schorr.
Rediscovering Community
Americans who agree on nothing else, writes William Raspberry, agree that we used to live in wonderful neighborhoods and communities. The neighborhoods that we who are middle-aged and older remember nostalgically may have been poor, seedy, segregated, and populated by the rejected and exploited, but they were our communities and we miss them.
Without a sense of community, says John Gardner, “people lose the conviction they can improve the quality of their lives through their own efforts.”
My friend and colleague Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, reminisces about growing up in Bennettsville, South Carolina, in her wonderful books, The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours:
“I went everywhere with my parents and was under the watchful eye of members of the congregation and community who were my extended family. They kept me when my parents went out of town, they reported on me and chided me when I strayed from the straight and narrow of community expectations, and they basked in and supported my achievements when I did well. Doing well, they made clear, meant high academic achievement, playing piano in Sunday school, participating in other church activities, being helpful, displaying good manners, and reading.”
Gil Walker’s memories of his childhood in Gary, Indiana, also feature networks of adults engaged with children, promoting community values.
“I can remember, when I was coming up, walking home from school with my report card in my hand. Before I got home, five or six people wanted to see it. If it was a good report card, I got hugs, I got kisses… If it was a bad report card, everyone of those individuals said, ‘Gil Walker, you know you could do better… ‘”
Gil Walker now runs a midnight basketball program for young people who live in Chicago public housing as his way of trying to replace the lost networks he remembers.
So what happened to those communities?
They have been rapidly eroding all over the industrialized world. Some combination of the following have interacted to weaken community bonds everywhere:
- Fear of crime, violence, and disorder deters people from gathering informally in public spaces. Public parks and playgrounds seem more threatening than welcoming. Older people especially, traditionally the backbone of neighborhoods, are afraid to venture out of their homes. In many neighborhoods, vigilant mothers keep their children – even teenagers – at home to keep them safe.
- Rapid advances in transportation and communication, together with the requirements of the post-industrial economy and the attraction of the suburbs and mild climates, have required and allowed vast number of people to move far from their neighborhoods and families of origin. Mobility has become easy and frequent – for all but the poor and elderly and those marooned by racial prejudice.
- The women who used to organize the PTA, volunteer in hospitals, and operate as front-porch disciplinarians and supervisors of the street scene are elsewhere. Some left with the opening of professional and workplace opportunities from which they had been excluded. Many more entered the labor market out of economic necessity.
- With the increase of single-parent families, many parents (usually mothers) must be both nurturer and breadwinner, leaving little time for community relationships.
- Technology has made it unnecessary to leave home and mingle with others to see movies and plays and listen to music. We watch sports on television rather than play them with our children, friends, and neighbors, and we listen to intimate matters being discussed by Oprah’s guests rather than our own.
- The scale of most institutions that touch our lives makes it harder to make connections. The corner grocery has been replaced by the supermarket, neighborhood stores by regional Wal-Marts, and even six-year-olds have to cope with elementary schools of two thousand children. Political institutions have become so large and so complex that most people have no chance to work together to solve small-scale problems, and feel they have no control over how their taxes are spent or how their children are taught.
For all these reasons and more, Americans feel less anchored, more adrift. Political philosopher Michael Sandel believes that the erosion of community lies at the heart of our contemporary discontent.
Robert F. Kennedy was one of the first American politicians to recognize that the loss of community was hurting us, individually and collectively. Not long before he was killed, he called attention to the destruction of “the thousand invisible strands of common experience and purpose, affection, and respect, which tie men to their fellows.” He believed that the world beyond the neighborhood has become “impersonal and abstract…beyond the reach of individual control or even understanding.” In his 1968 presidential campaign, he called for the restoration of community as “a place where people can see and know each other, where children can play and adults work together and join in the pleasures and responsibilities of the place where they live.”
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more