From my 6- and 7-year-old vantage point, being a kid in Brooklyn, N.Y., was just about perfect. In the few blocks between my house and school, I walked past an array of houses, apartment buildings, and little stores and offices with big glass windows. Holding my mama's hand, I walked under subway trestles so loud I had to cover my ears and scrunch my whole face shut when a train clattered by overhead. Every sidewalk had spaces carved out for trees, the roots of the older ones pushing up the concrete in sharp-edged cracks. Many stores had metal doors to storage basements set into the sidewalks that, when open, always looked to me like passages to secret underworlds. I was happy to see them closed and padlocked, and took great care never to walk across them.
In fair weather, everyone was outside, sitting on stairs or painted stoops or folding chairs, playing checkers or gossiping from window ledges in German or Yiddish or English. Kids bounced balls in alleys and jumped through chalked hopscotch grids or tightened roller skates around sneakers and tried not to get tripped by sidewalk cracks.
The candy-store owner seemed to know all the kids and their parents, if not by name, by sight. Good customers occasionally got an extra penny's worth of sugary pastel dots stuck on big paper rolls, leaving our fingers and chins all sticky and sweet.
Winter snowstorms brought out thick parkas, boots, mittens and hats, leaving only our noses and eyes peeking out. The snow muffled every sound except that "whift, whift" noise my arms made against the shell of my parka, and the crunch of a first step into untouched snow. We'd stay out until our lips were blue, and we were stiff with ice, then mama would fuss at the mess we made as we melted and puddled inside the front door, shivering.
I'll admit it: Looking at life from 3 feet off the ground can be idyllic. I didn't have to deal with traffic or parking. I still bounced when I fell on the ice or tripped on concrete. The high cost of city real estate didn't bother me. No one ever threatened to abduct me, even when I went around the block to get milk or batteries with a dollar or two clutched extra-tight in my fist so it wouldn't fly away. Talk about adventure!
It seemed everyone knew one another, and always, always someone was looking out and watching over the kids.
These days, neighborhoods like my childhood Brooklyn would be called "mixed-use." My family lived in a duplex, but across the street and around the corner, lots of folks lived in apartments over green grocers, hardware, music and bookstores, the occasional laundromat or barbershop, and maybe a pizza joint on the corner. It seemed we could get just about everything we needed within walking distance. I remember apartment buildings next to churches next to public schools.
Cities grew up around neighborhoods. Before America became a suburban car culture, if you didn't live in a city, you either had money or you were connected to the land in some way, farming or ranching or supporting those activities. It might seem like we've always had suburbs, but they are a modern phenomenon, less than 70 years in the making.
By the late 1960s, urban architecture was heavily influenced by abstract art, most notably that of Piet Mondrian and urban planner Le Corbusier, who enthusiastically embraced abstract forms and industrial design.
"Architecture has for its first duty, in this period of renewal, that of bringing about a revision of values, a revision of the constituent elements of the house. We must create the mass production spirit," he wrote in 1923.
Le Corbusier promoted tearing down old "decrepit" neighborhoods in favor of glass and concrete towers devoted to commerce. His theories advocated separating homes from businesses, creating huge inner-city apartment complexes that isolated people's living spaces from the rest of their lives.
Suburbs increased our isolation, sprawling in the wake of the post-World War II economic boom and the Interstate highway system. Urged on by the Madison Avenue-created American dream, everyone wanted a house and yard, two cars and a gleaming new kitchen in the latest color. Integration forced the issue as those with means abandoned cities like Jackson to those without, aka white flight.
Families, like cities, moved from the core as the young, educated and upwardly mobile moved as far away as possible from parents and grandparents, separating themselves from the generations before them.
These days, the pendulum is swinging back the other way. Mixed-use is a favored buzzword of urban planners. Young people are living at home longer, and multi-generational households are normal again. Environmentally aware and financially challenged, young people seem less interested in the outward trappings of success than in sustainable environments where living, working and entertainment options are all within arms reach. People want to give their children safe, sane neighborhoods, free of the aggression and violence engendered by America's late 20th-century's abstracted and isolated existence.
Family values, it turns out, aren't so much about being seen at church in our Sunday best. Instead, families embrace and teach the philosophies and ethics of faith traditions, among them compassion, generosity, equanimity and passing on knowledge.
My relationship to my birth family is complicated. Without aunts, uncles or cousins, it is tiny, and regrettably, some of us don't like one another all that much. But, while never warm and fuzzy, my family has been generous in its gifts, like strong attitudes for integrity and work.
Among my father's gifts are political skepticism, distrust for the motivations of the wealthy and a lifelong thirst for knowledge. From my mother, I received my strength of will, determination and musical ear. My sister Lisa nurtured my curiosity and gave me the ability to be awed by nature, and my sister Inga provides a never-ending opportunity to practice forgiveness.
It's more convoluted than that, of course. I'd be willing to bet your family, whether that of birth or time, is complex, too. As much as I want to deny it, though, my family made the deepest well of my being, and they deserve my gratitude. But my 7-year-old self is just thankful for Brooklyn.
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