I was the designated babysitter yesterday. I had 2 kids and a truck. So, we went to Edgewood Park where they climbed trees and delighted an audience of developmentally disabled adults out on an excursion. From my I'm-not-moving vantage point (as in if you climb that tree, you better figure out a way to get down without breaking your neck because I'm not rescuing you, Little Kittens) I watched the black boys and men play basketball. As Niece No. 1 so perceptively observed, there were 2 games going on -- the teenagers and the adults. It broke my heart: It was mid-day on a Friday. Why weren't they at school or work? (I, we, know why.)
A city park on a weekday is populated by the disabled -- by the economy, by culture, by either physical or emotional disability, by illness, or illegal status, or the imperative of caring for very young children sans institutional childcare. As it is in Edgewood, it is in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, except that in Brooklyn the comet's tail of bikers and joggers rushing past obscures that fact.
New Haven, Elm City, is a beautiful city, especially in the spring, and we left one park in search of another. But, I wanted to see the newly redeveloped Brookside so I decided to detour before we got to the next set of swings. Back in 2009 when I was a public health study surveyor my partner and I drove out to the city's west side to interview residents of public housing. I was stunned. I knew New Haven wasn't all Whitney Avenue or Morris Cove; it wasn't even just my modest neighborhood. But the west side of town, where these projects were located took my breath away, and I wasn't kidding when I came back barking that they were Bantustans, and although I was under no illusions that New Haven was le plus ultra in progressive urban planning, locating housing so far away from any and every kind of commercial center and supplying the entire area of mono-income families with one school, well if that wasn't worse than red-lining, show me the hell what is.
Later I was told that those projects were to be demolished, and I was actually shown plans for the new development. Pretty houses, I thought, wouldn't mind one of those myself. But, I asked, where's the bus stop? Where's the grocery? Surely the developers and designers already know that pretty townhouses do not a community make? I don't want to get all New Urbanism-y here, but for god's sake I spent 1 1/2 years in Columbia, MD, and during the years I lived there I learned all I need know about Good-looking Dead Space. (I concede that it may be a better place to live now.) And that experiment is over 30 years old; not at all hard to research what it has become.
The kids and I drove through the development -- the windy streets, the newly-planted trees, the beautifully rendered, differentiated homes. As the Irish say: very nice, very luvly. And yet, once it's populated, what will the people living here do? If you don't have a car, if you're not the driver, where can you go, what can you do? All I could think of was bored 13 and 14 year olds with too much time on their hands. Too much early sex. Too much food consumed to assuage loneliness and boredom. Too much trouble to make because you feel trapped.
What will destroy Brookside cannot be prevented by fresh paint and square corners. As if yet another ersatz stage set of the American Dream truly addresses the socio-economic and racial divide we all pretend isn't as pernicious as it is. Be ashamed New Haven, be very ashamed.
A city park on a weekday is populated by the disabled -- by the economy, by culture, by either physical or emotional disability, by illness, or illegal status, or the imperative of caring for very young children sans institutional childcare. As it is in Edgewood, it is in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, except that in Brooklyn the comet's tail of bikers and joggers rushing past obscures that fact.
New Haven, Elm City, is a beautiful city, especially in the spring, and we left one park in search of another. But, I wanted to see the newly redeveloped Brookside so I decided to detour before we got to the next set of swings. Back in 2009 when I was a public health study surveyor my partner and I drove out to the city's west side to interview residents of public housing. I was stunned. I knew New Haven wasn't all Whitney Avenue or Morris Cove; it wasn't even just my modest neighborhood. But the west side of town, where these projects were located took my breath away, and I wasn't kidding when I came back barking that they were Bantustans, and although I was under no illusions that New Haven was le plus ultra in progressive urban planning, locating housing so far away from any and every kind of commercial center and supplying the entire area of mono-income families with one school, well if that wasn't worse than red-lining, show me the hell what is.
Later I was told that those projects were to be demolished, and I was actually shown plans for the new development. Pretty houses, I thought, wouldn't mind one of those myself. But, I asked, where's the bus stop? Where's the grocery? Surely the developers and designers already know that pretty townhouses do not a community make? I don't want to get all New Urbanism-y here, but for god's sake I spent 1 1/2 years in Columbia, MD, and during the years I lived there I learned all I need know about Good-looking Dead Space. (I concede that it may be a better place to live now.) And that experiment is over 30 years old; not at all hard to research what it has become.
The kids and I drove through the development -- the windy streets, the newly-planted trees, the beautifully rendered, differentiated homes. As the Irish say: very nice, very luvly. And yet, once it's populated, what will the people living here do? If you don't have a car, if you're not the driver, where can you go, what can you do? All I could think of was bored 13 and 14 year olds with too much time on their hands. Too much early sex. Too much food consumed to assuage loneliness and boredom. Too much trouble to make because you feel trapped.
What will destroy Brookside cannot be prevented by fresh paint and square corners. As if yet another ersatz stage set of the American Dream truly addresses the socio-economic and racial divide we all pretend isn't as pernicious as it is. Be ashamed New Haven, be very ashamed.
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