Sep 13
2010
No matter our place, a common sense of public space bonds us. We need public spaces to walk and play, to make art and music, to shop and eat, to be silent.
When was the last time you felt connected with your own neighbors and why?
Caren gave the final word
This is a difficult question for me to answer, because it implies that there are times when I don’t feel connected to my neighbors. For me, that’s never the case. I always feel a strong sense of connection with my neighbors, am always conscious of them. They inform me. They shape my everyday.
And, reflecting further on this, I realize that that has always been true for me, everywhere I have ever lived. From a rural farming community in northern Minnesota (where I spent the first eighteen years of my life), to Minneapolis, to various places in France, to New Haven, to New York, my neighbors have always been a strong presence in my life.
This makes me wonder if “neighborhoods” are less static things than dynamic decisions we all make, consciously or unconsciously, all of the time.
What would it be like to live in the kind of community that Steven Heller describes? I would like to think that I would find a way in. As impervious as someone or something may seem, there has to be some looseness somewhere. A point of vulnerability. An opportunity for a connection to be made. Somehow.
Friday, September 17 at 6:26pm
I am so fortunate to live in a close-knit neighborhood where the kids all run from house to house and play together. We send them to ride their bikes around the block without a thought. In fact, we are so close with our back-door neighbors we repurposed a pool ladder to go over our fence and make getting to each others’ houses easier: http://www.flickr.com/photos/christykilgorehadley/4987170696/
Monday, September 13 at 12:23pm
I live just north of the Village on the last residential block before industrial streets with converted lofts. Sadly, I guess, there is absolutely no sense of community or connectivity. There are many familiar faces but barely a nod, no less an hello. Maybe its the nature of Manhattan. I know my friends in Brooklyn – the ones who share backyards (even with fences) – have a sense of community. But in my neighborhood people just go with the flow, mind their own business, and try not to double park.
Monday, September 13 at 1:11pm
Wow, I couldn’t imagine not being friendly with my neighbors. I always have been, in all the places where I’ve lived.
I remember saying hello to a neighbor of a girl I was dating, they smiled and returned the gesture. My girl was not so pleased, telling me she doesn’t talk to them.
I didn’t understand why not then, and I don’t understand now. But it seems to me, apartment people are not as friendly to their neighbors as are people who live in houses. I have lots of thoughts on the matter, from being to close to one another, to the idea of the impermanence of ones residence, how much can you trust someone that moves every four to eight months?
Monday, September 13 at 2:18pm
The last time I felt a connection with my neighbors was last month, when I was preparing to move out of the West Village apartment building I’d lived in for the past 15 years. I’d had passing conversations with neighbors over the years, at times more meaningful than others (the 2003 blackout, for instance), but I hadn’t felt that connected to them until I was leaving. Bittersweet, but better late than never.
Monday, September 13 at 1:24pm
I live in the home my grandfather grew up in. My neighbors are my cousins, the children of my grandfather’s sister. Two more houses away is my mother’s house, the home I grew up in.
So you can imagine the connection I have to my neighbors. I love them very much. They are my family. My cousins I grew up with.
As for the rest of my neighbors. Well most of them I’m very friendly with. Some of them are the closest of my friends. What else can I say?
Your question reminded me of a lyric from a song, “This is my town, this is my city, these are my people.”
Thanks. You reminded me that I’m very lucky to be in this place I call home.
frank.
Monday, September 13 at 1:59pm
The last time when I felt connected to my neighbors was when I was a kid and it felt okay to just go to anyone and say hello. My family has moved from house to house very often since then, and never quite form a community around where we live. I just moved to Austin and am living in a small apartment complex – perhaps this is a good time to remember what it’s like to know the people who live around me.
Monday, September 13 at 2:07pm
It is okay okay to just go to anyone and say hello. especially if you’re neighbors. I’m 37 years old, I remember commercials about “don’t talk to strangers” this idea the everybody else is out to take advantage of you is crazy. And a lot of my peers have baggage(trust issues) from being taught not to be friendly.
Monday, September 13 at 2:24pm
I find that moving is sometimes the best way to get to know your neighbors. At least when you are moving into a tight apartment building in some big city. Running in and out, as you try to hoist heavy items up several flights of stairs, your probability of Chance Encounters goes way up. And so does your probability of having people hold the door for you with a smile, or even lift a few choice pieces of furniture for you out of kindness (or pity). A smile or a lent hand turns into exchange of names and soon they’re inviting you over for fundraising house party drinks.
At least that was the experience at my last place in Boston. So far people here in Manhattan have been a bit more standoffish. But a guy in the hallway yesterday offered a “Hello” as I was heading out to class. A start.
Monday, September 13 at 4:50pm
Yesterday. There’s a teeny little bulb of a park a block from my house, with a playground for small children. Hung out with Jules there, met many neighbors, mostly through their small children.
Monday, September 13 at 2:29pm
just yesterday it was lightly raining, and my daughter happened upon a neighbor’s daughter who had set up her own little garage sale on the sidewalk. next thing you know the two of them are side-by-side, rain slickers on, helping each other sell stuff to passersby and other neighbors in the building. my daughter made a new friend, and i connected not only with the parents, but with a host of other neighbors who stopped by to chat. nothing like children to help foster a sense of community.
Monday, September 13 at 2:38pm
When I had a dog I found that I consistently had interactions with my neighbors. I didn’t realize just how many personal conversations I had until now! I don’t have the dog anymore and that catalyst for conversation is gone. I wonder what the other ways are to start conversations with the young (perhaps apathetic?) strangers in my building?
Friday, September 17 at 6:20pm
My neighbors are some of my closest friends, and we connect almost daily, especially when the weather is nice. I attribute this to the fact that we all have stoops, and most of us have dogs. Both mean that we spend a lot of time outside and have ample opportunities to connect with one another.
I’ve come to think of the stoop as a requirement for urban living. I’d love my own backyard—the urge to plant things just isn’t satisfied by the handful of pots I have now—but I’d never sacrifice having a stoop for that. A backyard is private, closed; a stoop is part of the landscape of the street, where you can’t help but see and talk to the people walking by. It’s a bridge between the privacy of the home and the anonymity of the city.
Monday, September 13 at 5:58pm
I had a remarkable moment this summer the first time I used Foursquare, the location-based social networking service, to “check-in” on the subway. I was crossing the Manhattan Bridge and found a location for the D Train on the Bridge! Many people had left notes about mundane things like how great the air-conditioning was. In that moment I felt a profound sense of connection to the people around me. No longer strange weirdos to be avoided on the subway, these were people just like me.
Monday, September 13 at 8:36pm
Any thing that changes your perception of people from strange weirdos to be avoided into just like me, is great. Be it social networking through an app, or otherwise.
hmmm… maybe if you check in when you get home, you might see your neighbor did too. maybe they posted a note about walking the dog or a neighborhood event that can lead to some social interaction with the people who actually live around you.
I’ve never been on the subway, but I have gone ridding on the metro in LA. Everybody around me had headsets on. Apple killed real life interaction with strangers with the ipod.
Monday, September 13 at 9:27pm
Ha. Frank, I appreciate your comment! I think Apple is only continuing what Sony began with the Walkman some (gulp) 30 years ago…
Especially in light of Christopher Fahey’s brilliant observations above, it’s interesting to me that the topic caused me to think about my relationship with strangers rather than the people who literally live next door to me.
I imagine it has to do with all the time I spend in “virtual” space (Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) and how substantive I find those relationships and connections can be. I feel the person I’m able to connect to through technology is my neighbor though she lives on the other side of the world, or is sitting on the other end of a subway car.
Tuesday, September 14 at 7:39pm
Depending on where and how you live, the word “neighbor” might mean many different things.
Living in a huge converted warehouse building in Brooklyn, NY, I live within a hundred feet of 250 different people. But my mother lives in Vermont, and there may be less than a dozen people within half a mile of her house.
If I spend half of my day away from home, at my office and in the surrounding neighborhood, perhaps it’s just as well to consider the people I work with, or the people in the offices and businesses near my workplace, to be as much my neighbors as the people who live and sleep near my home.
I commute, and I see many of the same people on the train every day. Are they my neighbors?
Living in a huge pedestrian-friendly city, on any given day I will look into the eyes and faces of literally thousands of different people. A suburbanite, on the other hand, might make eye contact with a total of 50 people even on a busy day.
Do I have a thousand “neighbors”? Ten thousand? A million?
And, of course, I spend a lot of time online, in virtual communities, interacting and observing and caring about people who I never see in real life. Are the people I don’t know or consider personal friends but follow on Twitter my neighbors?
The initial question feels a little loaded, as if designed to confront our sense of alienation from the people around us and to make us question our detachment from our communities. I wonder, however, if the definition of what we think of as our communities, and indeed our “neighborhoods”, needs to be re-examined.
Or maybe the point is that we shouldn’t forget about the people who sleep under the physical roofs to the left and right of our front doors. In my case, I know both families very well. One of them has emergency keys to our apartment, and the other lets us hear them have outrageous screaming sex every Sunday morning. So yeah, I feel pretty connected to my neighbors.
Tuesday, September 14 at 6:45pm
The last time I felt connected with my neighbors was today – and it’s not because our homes are spaced just 6 feet apart. We live together, eat together, some of us even pray together. What started it all was when we established a “mealshare” between 4 families on our street.
The way it works is one family cooks for themselves and the other 3 families once a week. So I cook on Monday, Steph cooks on Tuesday, Anne cooks on Wednesday and Tara cooks on Thursday. We get home-cooked meals every day of the week, because there are usually leftovers by the time Friday rolls around. We save money, have more free time for our families and get to hang out with our other neighbors!
It is the most awesome thing EVER. And it has inadvertently created some of the deepest friendships of my life.
Wednesday, September 15 at 8:38am
I could point to the times we run into each other working in our yards but, while that kind of connection is certainly common it does little to really build a sense of community.
I live in a suburban neighborhood of Houston, TX where long commutes and hot temperatures drive people quickly into their homes in the evening. Having Hurricane Ike knock out our power for nearly a week changed that pattern substantially.
Houses were dark and hot. Streets needed to be cleaned up. Neighbors needed to be checked on. I never realized how many kids lived in our neighborhood until they were driven outside by the blank screens of TVs, Computers and hand held devices.
That was the strongest sense of connection I think our area has had in recent history. We were all out in the streets mingling, discussing and making sure everyone was taken care of, like good neighbors do.
Wednesday, September 15 at 10:14am
There was a storm here last night in New York City, and I was on the highway when it happened. People were banded together, outside their cars, wondering what had happened once the storm had passed. As we drove through the streets of Queens following, streetlights were dark, power was out. With trees down and neighbors out on the streets, there was an unstated connection as people emerged to explore.
Friday, September 17 at 4:30pm
I live in Bolton Hill in Baltimore and one of my best neighbors, just a block away, is MICA. I feel especially connected to this institutional neighbor this time of year when all the students return, breathing huge puffs of young, bohemian, creative air into the neighborhood. And even though we live right across the street from one of the urban dorms, these students are surprisingly well-behaved and respectful of our common space.
Because of the social ills that plague much of Baltimore, I’ve found this neighborhood to be much tighter knit and friendly than the neighborhoods I lived in in DC and Seattle.
Thursday, September 16 at 10:30am
I live in a busy area of Manhattan where my neighbors blend in with the droves of strangers along Broadway. So I can’t even tell who my physical neighbors are… I know some people in my building, and one in particular is an industrial designer so we have a common base to connect over.
But I think this leads to an interesting theory from evolutionary psychology. If we observe the “selfish gene” strategy and assume that all friendliness is actually reciprocal altruism, why are some areas friendlier than others? The hypothesis is that in more densely populated areas there is less likelihood you will interact with people repeatedly, so you have less motivation to behave altruistically because there’s usually nothing to gain in return.
Certainly in NYC we walk past countless people that we’ll never cross paths with in the future, so it’s easy to be a jerk with no consequences. However, in a small town where everyone knows everyone, we naturally strive to maintain a positive relationship with our consistent neighbors.
In the past, your tribe included your physical neighbors, but in the modern world your tribe shifts beyond locality into mentality. We are connected to people we feel a commonality with, and this is dynamic depending on the situation. So for 9/11, most New Yorkers felt a universal threat and united in response. Yet today we see the Ground Zero mosque is another tribal debate. It saddens me that human nature is so deeply rooted in tribalism. Sometimes we need a common enemy to connect us, and that’s why I think the plot in The Watchmen graphic novel is so morbidly brilliant.
Friday, September 17 at 2:34am
Caren gave the Final Word
This is a difficult question for me to answer, because it implies that there are times when I don’t feel connected to my neighbors. For me, that’s never the case. I always feel a strong sense of connection with my neighbors, am always conscious of them. They inform me. They shape my everyday.
And, reflecting further on this, I realize that that has always been true for me, everywhere I have ever lived. From a rural farming community in northern Minnesota (where I spent the first eighteen years of my life), to Minneapolis, to various places in France, to New Haven, to New York, my neighbors have always been a strong presence in my life.
This makes me wonder if “neighborhoods” are less static things than dynamic decisions we all make, consciously or unconsciously, all of the time.
What would it be like to live in the kind of community that Steven Heller describes? I would like to think that I would find a way in. As impervious as someone or something may seem, there has to be some looseness somewhere. A point of vulnerability. An opportunity for a connection to be made. Somehow.
Friday, September 17 at 6:26pm
Keywords
Selected list of words appearing in this and other conversations.
Tina Roth Eisenberg
Designer/Blogger
1
Yesterday, camping out in a big book store in Brooklyn Heights with my 7month old son. We were hiding from the rain. Obviously, we were not the only ones with this idea. So, in parental solidarity, we huddled together in a corner of the bookstore and took turns in reading books to our little ones. Community at its best.
Monday, September 13 at 11:56am