The Death of the Front Porch and the Sidewalk
Guest Blogger Alert!
I know. At what point do you become less of a guest, and more of a resident? When Brendan comes to visit, do I make him get his own beer out of the fridge or do I still do the “Good Host” thing and serve it to him?
Well folks - he’s getting well acquainted with the fridge at this point. What do you think?
by Brendan Houghton
We are social creatures. Look at how a Native village was built. All of the lodges or tepees are built with the entrances facing each other. The Anasazi, who built large houses out of limestone on large cliffs in the Four Corners Region in the United States built terraces and public spaces outside of their homes, so that people could commune and know each other. They did this not just in the spirit of togetherness, but for safety reasons. This was transferred up through history in all of the places we lived. The apartments had balconies, and if they didn’t, people would congregate below on the street where markets were set up. Friendships and family ties were cemented. We felt safe because how can you steal from someone you know, someone you talk to every day? Neighbourhoods were an oasis from the unknown city, and we policed each other and kept a watchful eye over each other’s children and loved ones.
When it came to our houses we built them with one centralised focal point. We built them with front porches that lead to the sidewalk. Picture grand old Victorian homes with their luxurious wrap-around porches and antebellum mansions with their porches and verandas that stretched the entire length of the house. This is where we were once social, where we once sat to escape the heat and boredom of the inside. However, with the advent of television, air conditioning, and then a fear of our neighbours, the front porch became a relic of home design akin to the dumb waiter and coal shute.
From the front porch we could watch our children play, outside, riding their bikes ceaselessly up and down the sidewalks and playing an endless game of tag. We could catch up with the other neighbours and truly become a part of our neighbourhood. We could watch the seasons change and listen to the cicadas in the old trees above us. We could quench our ancient instinct to talk with people around us. Now we live in a world where privacy is the very definition of safety. We have become a society obsessed with being private and predictable. If they can’t see you, they can’t hurt you. You can see it everywhere, from the way our houses are uniformly built, to the way there are no old growth trees in the newer suburbs, because a limb could snap off a tree in a thunderstorm and crush your Lincoln Navigator, or worse yet, take out your garage with your Ford F 350.
You can see it in the way our streets bend and curve, so that no one can speed down them like a maniac, as people uncontrollably and automatically do when confronted with a nice straight street, I suppose. It’s as if being unique makes you a target. As long as you are the same as everyone else, you will be ignored, and that is what suburbanites want. They just want to be left alone. Being alone is the very thing that makes us vulnerable.
Of course the classless activity of walking is out of the question for the noble suburbanite, so they “forgot” to build a sidewalk. As a direct result of this, those brave souls who do walk around their own neighbourhoods risk serious injury. You could lay there for hours and no one would find you. Not a soul heard the screeching tires or the unmistakable thud of human flesh on the pavement because they were all transfixed in their windowless dens watching Lost. Besides, there really aren’t any windows that face the street because the garage takes up the space once occupied by windows, a door, a porch and a path to a sidewalk. Even cavemen would gather at the entrance to their caves and grunt at each other, and show each other how well versed in gazelle painting they were. Now we have retreated in our wood panelled caves like hermits, and this is totally acceptable. I mean, have you SEEN Heroes on a 52” lcd?
It is such a telling sign of the times the way we build our dwellings. The porch has now been replaced by its once maligned cousin, the deck in the backyard. Through a sliding glass threshold we can put our barbecues on it and watch over are cement ponds from this lofty, pine vantage point. We can surround our backyards with privacy fences that are so high Shaquille O’Neal would need a stepping stool to peer over. We imprison ourselves in a make believe world of sanctuary and peace, we name the streets with the prefix “crescent” or “lane” to somehow bring back our Kellogg’s Corn Flake memories of the past, when people all knew each other, when the world was a better place. They simply don’t understand that the old world was a world of porches, public squares, and sidewalks. People simply spoke to each other and a lot of problems were either solved, or never even materialised, simply from the fact that most people find it utterly impossible to steal from or harm someone they know. Safety lies in communication, not privacy.
Todays ideal must be this: You wake up, you get ready for work, you enter your car that is waiting for you in your garage. You drive out of your garage and hastily close the door with your remote as you three point turn your way along the winding roads until you hit the expressway and then work. You park your car inside and walk to the elevator that takes you to your office. You space out for a while and finish your day and take the elevator down to your waiting car and come home again. The ideal seems to be not even going outside anymore. It sure is a wonderful way to live. If you are lucky, your nostrils will never smell the morning air again, unless your wife buys an air freshener called “Morning Air”, of course. We have become so afraid of everything that we dare not go outside any longer than we have to. Everything is inside our dens, and on our couches. Take a drive to Tecumseh. (you sure as hell can’t get there any way else) I want to see if you notice something. This place is supposed to be teeming with people. So where is everyone? Drive down the winding, confusing crescents and lanes, and notice how it resembles downtown Chernobyl. It is totally deserted, devoid of people. The only signs of life are the cars parked in front of the massive garage doors, but try to find a person. You will be out of luck Mr. Cousteau. Then try to knock on someone’s door and see if they answer. I’ll save you the trip, they won’t. They are inside, afraid of the outside world in their little slice of Attica that they built up around themselves.
In order to stop a lot of ills that plague our society we need to talk to each other and communicate. We need to dismantle the garages and the privacy fences and build homes with character again. We must embrace natural light, windows, porches, sidewalks and old trees again before we become a culture of hermits who only step outside to barbecue a steak or to relentlessly clean our pools we never swim in.
Change comes from dialogue. Dialogue comes from within; we all have it inside of us, somewhere deep inside…. Maybe we left it on the front porch.
Tags: pedestrian, place making, walkable
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How true it is. My personal favourite is the monster houses with the cars parked in the driveway because the 2-car garage is filled with all the stuff that couldn’t fit in the 4-bedroom, full basement house. Our “needs” list has grown ridiculously and we definitely don’t want to share it with anyone else.
“Good fences make good neighbours” - ah the privacy fence. How did they manage to creep into and take over our lives without us barely even noticing it? As a child, growing up on Pelissier street, I could see almost to the end of the block in my own back yard. Everyone had those 3-4 ft. chain link fences and what went on in the backyards of your neighbours was an open book. Maybe that’s why a neighbour was able to see someone shimmying a back window open one night and call the police in time to interupt the would be thief. Now everyone drives into their huge attached garage and enter our home without ever interacting with our neighbours. When we do go outside, it’s as you said - to the backyard which has become a virtual island. The boards are spaced closer than ever today, usually on both sides too just in-case there’s 1 cm from which to “peek”. Thankfully we have a few neighbours who still use their front porches in our older neighbourhood - and it’s a small pleasure to be able to wave to them as you come and go.
I love walking along down any new street in Windsor and Lasalle (because sidewalks dont get built) and passing by all those beautiful garage doors.
I wouldn’t wish sub-urban living on anyone, most look like used car lots with the minimum two vehicles (your choice), pig nose homes with garage doors in front demonstrating the homes importance …a place for the car! And not the front door!
Yesterday I had to get out to Naylor’s Kitchen and Bath designers on Jefferson just south of the Road Warriors expressway! Spending a few minutes on Transit Windsor’s website, it was the Ottawa 4 that I needed to use to get as close as possible, Queen Elizabeth Drive to Clemenceau was the jump off point.
Here’s a link to Transit Windsor’s Ottawa 4 route
http://www.citywindsor.ca/DisplayAttach.asp?AttachID=8365
There is just no straight line to anywhere on this route but it does take you through many old neighbourhoods of Windsor. Travel time to the jump off point 45 minutes (from Wyandotte and Ouellette,) then a fifteen minute walk to Naylor’s, with sidewalks on the west side of Jefferson (opposite Naylor’s and other businesses,) then cross Jefferson and walk on the road to my destination, no side walks the last five minutes! Thankfully it was a great day and there was no snowbanks to negotiate. And funny enough Jefferson was almost devoid of traffic for a Saturday afternoon, I mean, kids could have played street hockey on the street and not be worried about being hit. It must be different during the work week, when it becomes a feeder road to the outside world.
What’s my point? Riding the bus you get to see the neighbourhoods along the route. Ottawa street was okay, there were some people on the street but not busy just a lot of cars. My old neighbourhood (Olive and Seminole), Seminole was busy with people all over the sidewalks. Seminole has a Shopper’s Drug Mart, a Home Hardware and the Seminole Public Library, a Daisy Mart (the old Seminole Market that I remembered), a big Mac’s Milk gas bar (where a Supertest gas station was once) and kids all over on their bikes. Even quickly looking up the side streets, I could see people in their yards and on the street. Now if it had a good market, I could live in that neighbourhood again!
Continuing north on Pillette (not much has changed in fifty years, a little run down) along Wyandotte which was busy, turn south on Jefferson then wwest on to South National, turning onto Rivard Avenue and into Fontainbleau suburb.
I saw no one out front, lawns neatly tended in most cases with the two cars out front or in the drive ways, no kids playing. Election signs mixed with to many forsale signs! I past a huge church with an even larger surface parking lot (across from the Fontainbleau Public Library) which was filling with cars! Then to my jumping off point to hoof it to Naylor’s.
When I finished with Naylor’s, I decided to walk over to the library, since I have never been in that library and take a busman’s tour. It took me twenty minutes from Naylor’s to the library and as Brendan so nicely put it, I encountered two people walking, two on bicycles and one doing yard work and just five vehicles and three kids running in the park behind the library. Living in the core you get use to all the noise (not really!), especially emergency vehicles but what hit me hard in that burb was the almost dead silence of the place and the lack of life anywhere.
The Library was the only place you could walk to! No convenience stores…nothing, nada, zip! I went into the library and talked with colleagues, got the grand tour, there were only a handful of people in the library and prepared to leave and catch the bus. I asked in the library were was the nearest bus stop, one young employee told me that I would find one way down on the corner, a good block from the library, so I prepared to walk again. There was a bus stop right outside the library going north and home. Obviously the staff and people of Fontainbleau drive everywhere and don’t use the bus. I spoke of the church earlier right across from the library, well it was emptying out and I watched them, since there was nothing else to look at! The church appeared to be a neighbourhood church but nobody left walking, they all got into their vehicles and drove somewhere. The church was empty and so was that huge parking lot, the silence was complete! My conclusion was that there was nobody living in those homes of Fontainbleau. Splendid isolation! The twenty steps rule is in grand affect here, anything more than twenty steps from a vehicle to a door/mall/garage is unnatural and unWindsor like.
I was happy to be back downtown, there was a lot of people on Ouellette, the cross roads (Ouellette and Wyandotte) were busy, people drinking coffee on the sidewalks as I got closer to home. I see more of my neighbours in this condo that I live in on the street than I suspect I would ever do in the burbs!
I was very conscious of walking or having to walk in the burbs, I really felt out of place. I feel sorry for the young people to young to drive and those seniors who can’t drive anymore, the feeling of isolation must be immense.
Give me the old neighbourhoods and as derelict the core appears, at least there is life on the streets!
One more observation! The Tim Horton’s at Jefferson and Queen Elizabeth Drive is a total drive through, unlike most Timmies, this one only had one short counter for a sit down coffee! Not much if any foot traffic there and from the burbs you have to cross four lanes of traffic, that’s if you’re walking! I doubt it!
Mark, Tim Horton’s these days seems to make it clear they want you IN and OUT … F A S T - no hangin’ round sitting at tables sipping coffee and talking about last night’s hockey game. Those drive-thru only Tim Horton’s are the final solution to their car-driver customer base. Anyone remember when folksy independent donut shops dotted the landscape, and they were the social epicentre of every neighbourhood. Now the only independent “sit down and chew the rag” donut shop I can think of is Steimers, where they even [gasp] bake their own donuts on site. The Tim Horton’s that do have sit-down tables have “time limit” signs.
Even as someone who is not a regular bus rider, I do agree that a bus ride can be an eye opening experience. When you drive a car, there’s no time to pay attention to little nuances of the neighbourhoods one passes through. As a bus rider, you can just sit there and gaze out the window and notice things you didn’t notice before. I also observe the bus riders seem more connected with each other. It’s interesting to watch people get on, greet each other like they are old friends - just because they happen to ride the same route every day to work. No I don’t see Melanie passing out buttons but bus riders do seem to comprise a kind of community in Windsor - no “head down buried in paper” mentality. Nice.