A Walk to the City

A paper I wrote for a class about my experiences in the places I have lived:

I was raised in the Village of Smith Station, an old railroad station neighborhood surrounded by wheat, corn, trees, and cattle, a few miles outside Hanover, Pennsylvania. Not many decades ago, a farmer decided it would be wise to sell one-acre plots for residential use. My family inhabits one of those plots.

If there were ever a place which emphasized the private life, my hometown is that place. The recent history of our exact plot of land demonstrates this fact. As my mother bore more children, she and my father decided to expand our home, tripling the size. I no longer had to share the basement with my brother. It could be used as a hang-out den. My sisters also gained more space, and even guests could have their own bedroom. We added two bathrooms, significantly reducing our verbal communication, because we had often fought about how long our showers should be. The newly acquired floorspace in our home enabled us to play inside, further limiting our interaction with other local children, let alone our own siblings. Moreover, Jane Jacobs would be quick to point out that whenever we did play outside, we would primarily remain in the backyard, away from the view of drivers and neighbors across the street. To this day, I believe my mom knows more families than anyone in our neighborhood, and she only knows about 5% of the families. Each family has multiple vehicles, so when they want to get together with friends, they just drive out of the neighborhood.

I thought my rural private life was the norm until I attended an Orioles' baseball game. To get to the stadium, Dad and I walked through downtown. I saw a man sleeping in a back alley under a newspaper and asked Dad why he slept there. Dad just rushed me away, quickly switching topics. This was my first exposure to the city, a fascinating world that I wanted to explore. So many questions were forming from my bombarded senses.

The next few summers, I took every opportunity possible to go to downtown Chambersburg where my cousin lived. My dad often said he would never live in town, pointing to the dirty streets and the immoral people, but because my cousin lived there, I had a way to explore this urban jungle. We would often bike through town to find a basketball court where other people were playing. We joined so many impromptu games that we even started a street league of our own.

What I enjoyed most about dense residential areas was the people. Perhaps that is why when I encountered Emmaus, a settlement house in Gettysburg, I found myself visiting as often as possible. Their engagement with the public life of the local community was irresistible. In fact, to me, Emmaus was the local community. People of all sizes, interests, and backgrounds were consistently walking through the doors to say hello or invite us to a movie or the diner down the street. Residents of this settlement house were effective in helping their neighbors precisely because they knew the pulse of their place just as thoroughly as they knew their jobs (Jacobs, 420). For many involved at Emmaus, being active at the house was indeed a higher priority than career goals.

However, Gettysburg and Chambersburg were not intense cities. They were merely American towns for middle-class families, still with plenty of green grass and “an enjoyment of open space for its own sake” (Rybczynski, 78). Neither place had the intensity of downtown Baltimore which I remembered and craved.

When I moved away to Grantham for school, I quickly developed a desire to live in a land which was not car-dependent. I could only escape the Messiah College “bubble” by motor vehicle, due to the “mobile and decentralized” nature of greater Harrisburg (Rybczynski, 49), and I certainly did not have the money to buy one.

After a year of growing disconnected in my backcountry world of Grantham, I found a job washing dishes in Carlisle, and I subleased an apartment downtown. Work was two blocks away, an easy walk. On the days I did not want to walk, I could easily access all necessities (food, clothes, etc) by bike or skateboard. Once a week, the Amish farmers' market came to me, right in the square where I lived. Though I had much less space than in my hometown, I enjoyed my summer far more than usual. Three to five people at any given time were living in our one-bedroom apartment. Though town life was slightly noisier than the countryside, we could still access the local college campus to relax on Adirondack chairs, climb tress, and throw frisbee. We were not deprived of the “purer air” which Americans so deeply value (Rybczynski, 78). Our main joy, however, did not lie in the local parks or picnic getaways. The fact that life was shared with roommates, coworkers, storeowners, and same-building neighbors is what brought us happiness. We craved the public life, but whenever there was a day when we wanted privacy, we could easily just adjust our blinds and curtains, as Jacobs recommends (Jacobs, 59).

After only a few months of living in downtown Carlisle, I could easily point out the key characters in the daily sidewalk ballet of our block, everyone from the evening police officers at the Court House to the disabled smoker who crosses the square several times each day, rumored to be a local professor who was fired when he went mad. Conversely, I still cannot say a thing about the neighbors across the street in my hometown, who moved there about ten years ago. There is an inherent joy about knowing a place, and therefore knowing its people.

Tocqueville must have been ahead of his day when he noted how ceaselessly Americans change their residence, even venturing into the unknown frontier (Rybczynski, 109), for I too desired to go the the furthest reaches of our globalized world's frontier. My third college semester was spent in Uganda, where I lived with two families, one from the town and the other from a rural village. In these experiences I began to understand what it is like to be part of a solidified family unit. As previously mentioned, the togetherness of my biological family is weak, due in part to the very geography of our home. Ugandans, however, see the individual as a part of the whole, much like a branch is to a tree. Therefore, time is spent sitting together, even if there is no food or conversation. With no significant value on personal space or property, less resources are spent on absurdly large backyards or big homes. This private family life is strong, but public life may be even stronger. Visitors are always honored and seen as a blessing, rather than a distraction or burden. Some local languages use the same word for “guest” and “stranger,” indicating that anyone may come at any time, so the house must be prepared to accept whoever steps through the door.

After being exposed to such forms of hospitality, I decided that I needed a specific place to welcome others as well. I reasoned that the campus in Grantham would not be ideal because everyone has a private space of their own, such as dorms and apartments, and there are many public spaces for clubs to meet and friends to gather. Someone who studied with me in Uganda soon told me about the SALT (Serving and Living Together) House in Harrisburg. The idea seemed ideal. I had long missed the active community I had at Emmaus, and the Harrisburg Institute building had all the necessary facilities for inviting people in, including kitchens, classrooms, lounges, and for our friends dwelling in Grantham, free laundry.

The residents at SALT, both this semester and last semester, share meals together almost every day. Our lifestyle is simultaneously public and private. We have our own apartments in which we can retreat for privacy and quietness while completing schoolwork. However, we agree to leave our doors open as much as possible to give our building a homey flow. Agape Center volunteer teams do projects in our classrooms or hold celebrations and get-togethers. People of various neighborhoods in Harrisburg borrow our spaces for birthday parties. Ethnic minorities in the area hold language classes.

My favorite thing about living in the city, however, is practicing Jacobs' art of people-watching, examining the 9-to-5 business culture transition to the nightlife bar scene. Demographics change throughout the day. In Harrisburg, the world is at my fingertips. I can access dozens of one-of-a-kind restaurants seven days a week. Fellow residents and I can become a positive presence by playing alley soccer or sitting outside on the curb at night, watching drunk people come out of The Pub, ensuring the rest of downtown that “a well-used city street is apt to be a safe street” (Jacobs, 34), even when people have been drinking since morning.

So far, downtown Harrisburg has been the only place I feel comfortable calling “home.” Our neighborhood has a unique vibe that reminds us our place is not “Noplace” (Jacobs, 338). We are stationed in a section of town for commuters, facing a parking garage, surrounded by businesses and commercial buildings. Most of our residential neighbors are homeless people. Those who live at SALT also recognize that “children in cities need a variety of places in which to play and to learn” (Jacobs, 80), so we have art galleries in our building and invite the youth to participate in our street soccer matches. I am having the most fulfilling adventure I have ever had, and contrary to orthodox city planning which emphasizes mobility, privacy, and grass, I find that the more I stay still and rooted in my concrete wasteland of a home, the more I learn and enjoy myself.