Stumbling Toward Enlightenment

By Lori Rotenberk

On the equinox, March 20, a mostly forgotten sliver of a city neighborhood, where Goldeneyes and Coots fly low and fast along the river, the stalks of last season’s brush still steeped in snow, hummed with the celebration of the season’s unfolding. They gathered along the water’s banks, cutting back old growth, repairing paths and railings fashioned from tree branches. And when the day’s labor was done, the local chorus, calling themselves the Bullfrogs, sang songs bidding farewell to winter with a rousing cheer to spring.

This is life among the Riverbank Neighbors, ages 0 to 90, so named because of their close proximity to the once-shunned North Branch of the Chicago River and the life they’ve built around it. In one breath, they are both a throwback and the future, recalling a time when community thrived, often centered around the local landscape. Their recapture of life writ small and meaningful makes the art of porch sitting seem regal, a wooden step, a throne.

After his mother slipped down the muddy bank during a walk in 1994, Pete Leki took to clearing the thicket of weeds and gnarly trees hiding the ribbon of water long shunned because of its stink and ugliness. It was as if a curtain lifted — Well what have we here! — and for the first time, this mix of working class and upwardly mobile neighbors saw light bounce off the river.

Leki, an elementary school science teacher whose house is a mere stone’s throw from the river, built steps from discarded concrete and flagstone, fashioning railings from old tree branches. He posted bills about brush clearing around the neighborhood. A few turned into many. Together they shored up the bank, terracing the new soil to prevent erosion. Naming themselves Riverbank Neighbors, they began celebrating a day’s work with potlucks along the bank. Afterward, the Bullfrogs would sing a cappella — a bit of The Talking Heads or Sly and the Family Stone.

Old brush was replaced with native plants and trees: hazelnut and American plum, blue fruited dogwood, button bush. Rows of gooseberry bushes now yield fruit for pies and jams. Beavers have returned to the water, along with turtles and fish. Fox and Black-crowned Night Herons, Red-breasted Grosbeaks, and Great Horned Owls. Each house, it seems, has a canoe or kayak.

Alan Ehrenhalt, author of The Lost City, a study on the decline of communities in the U.S., says Riverbank Neighbors reflects a shift. Nature — parks and forests, farms and gardens — historically have been at the core of community. Today’s environmental concerns, such as climate change and mass extinction, increase the desire for people to live in more tightly knit communities. The swelling use of social media, he adds, is actually drawing people closer to where they want to meet in person.

In Chicago, the Riverbank Neighbors have set up a system of borrow and barter as a means to stay out of the big box stores. And they’ve created a fun, illustrated guide to keep them off the marketer’s map, titled How to Disappear.

Fridays mark the Walk Around, when many Riverbank Neighbors open their homes at the dinner hour and are visited by other neighbors who make their way from house to house, eating a bit of the meal, often grown in their own gardens, at every stop. There’s a requirement, however, that before moving on to the next home, guests and hosts must throw on some music and dance. Leki says the most recent tunes included some hip-hop, a Cajun waltz, and bits of classic rock.

On the first weekend day following an equinox, neighbors will gather and form a circle either outside or in someone’s house, and a member from each family tells what has transpired in their lives over the closing season — deaths, joy, achievements, birth. They will also go over their precise river management goals for the seasons ahead, detailing work to be done throughout the year.

At Waters Elementary School, where Leki teaches, the river’s history is taught in second and sixth grades and it includes study along its banks. Recently, the students met cellist Yo-Yo Ma, as part of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Rivers Festival, in which they celebrate great musical works centered around rivers. The kids sang a song they wrote about the river:

Long time ago, I think,
Indian kids could swim and drink
Now when kids come down to play,
A sign there says to stay away …

Rivers, the CSO stresses, are “forever intertwined with our past, present and future.”

The story of a day when Leki stood on the school roof, his students fanned out below, is now part of neighborhood history. With maps at his feet detailing the original location where the Chicago River once flowed, he directed students on the asphalt below. One by one, they lay colored circles on the blacktop, creating a colorful path where the ribbon of water used to be.

Word of the Riverbank Neighbors has spread. It’s common, Leki says, for people from outside of the hood to show up at a river event and say, “We’re not from the neighborhood, but we’d like to join in.” And they’re welcomed. People are hungry for community, Leki explains. “We no longer value the idea of ‘staying.’ Transiency has become the norm,” he says. “So we’re happy when they come to visit.”

Lori Rotenberk is a Chicago-based journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Boston Globe, Chicago Wilderness Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times. She is also also wild about nature. Follow her on Twitter.

Reposted from Grist
This post follows up on David Roberts’ series on “great places.”

I found out yesterday that one of my neighbors, a lady in her 70s, had been taken to the hospital with heart problems. Her middle-aged daughter, who lives with her, was the one who told me, when we met on the stretch of sidewalk between our two houses. We often stop to chat like this, trading news and gossip and small talk.

I expressed my concern and asked if there was anything that I could do. The daughter thanked me, and said she would pass along my well-wishes. Later, I found out from another neighbor that the older woman is going to be just fine. Phew.

So what does this have to do with the “great places” idea David Roberts began exploring a few weeks back? Here’s what: Great places have to be sustainable not just environmentally, but socially, too. Because human beings are social animals.

A street not far from where I live, designed for humans—not cars. Photo: Steve Minor

Those brief talks I had with my neighbors were typical—among dozens of similar interactions I have every week on my block and the streets around it. My dense, walkable, transit-rich neighborhood does a lot of great things for my carbon footprint (no car required, Zipcar within walking distance if I need one, farmers market only a few blocks away). But what it does for my soul might, in the end, be more important.

Over the years, I have traded dog-sitting services with one neighbor. A store around the corner has accepted packages for me when I’ve been out. I’ve gotten, and given, career advice while sitting on the stoop. I’ve dropped my wallet on the sidewalk and had it returned by a woman whom I know could have used the money inside. She didn’t touch the cash.

My son has ridden his scooter up and down the sidewalk, and we’ve played stickball with the neighbor kids in the street. I’ve shoveled the snow in front of the house of the old couple next door. I’ve given hugs, picked up trash, and offered my shoulder to cry on.

The street I live on is not just an address for me. It is an extension of my home.

That sense I have—that my living room extends into the street—is, sadly, a privilege in this day and age. It’s made possible by relatively low car traffic and high density of dwelling units on my block. This combination opens up a way of life that used to be common—in which human beings naturally connect with each other over time, forming networks that can then be called upon when the going gets rough.

Back in the late 1960s, a man named Donald Appleyard did some groundbreaking research into the way that car traffic kills street life and degrades the quality of urban communities. It was published in a book called Livable Streets, which will be back in print next year. He found that on streets with light car traffic, people felt more connected to their neighbors and their physical surroundings. The heavier the traffic, the more those connections suffered. The more the people suffered.

The video below, from Streetfilms, is an excellent illustration of his work.

Revisiting Donald Appleyard’s Livable Streets from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Since Appleyard did his research in San Francisco, automobiles have only grown more dominant on our streets. Recently, a British graduate student named Joshua Hart set out to replicate Appleyard’s findings, and the quotes from his dissertation [PDF] dramatize the toll autocentrism takes on human lives. Here’s what one man in his 50s said about the street where he lives:

[The traffic is] like a mountain range, cutting you off from the other side of the road…..it’s hellishly busy….a bloody nightmare. The buses and lorries shake the house when they come by. The air pollution can be quite bad out the front, sometimes during rush hour you feel the air getting thicker and thicker…..

Other recent studies have found that “social capital”—that is, the number and quality of human interactions—is higher in walkable communities. And even small increases in connectedness and activity can have significant health benefits.

Take a look at the video below as well, from Mike Biddulph of Cardiff University. It compares two different streets in Cardiff, Wales, at the same time of day. One is what is known in the U.K. as a “home zone”—a street that is designed with people as its primary focus, not cars. The other is a street with some traffic-calming measures in place, but where automobiles still dominate the streetscape visually and in terms of the space they occupy.

It becomes clear very quickly which street makes it inviting for people—especially children—to come out of their homes and do what primates generally like to do, which is to socialize with one another.

The concept of walkable, or livable, streets has slowly but surely been coming back into the mainstream conversation, in part because of the work of grassroots activists like Dan Burden. Burden has worked many hours (and walked many miles) to try to convince municipal officials that they should design their cities and towns for people instead of cars. People are taking notice. Streets are changing. More and more communities are passing “complete streets” legislation that requires streets to be designed with pedestrians and bikes in mind, not just cars. It shouldn’t just be 19th-century neighborhoods like mine that have a happy street life. It shouldn’t just be rich neighborhoods. It should be all neighborhoods.

But there are still way too many places in America where streets are for cars, and you take your life into your hands just trying to cross on foot. Changing our streets to bring them back to human scale will take generations. It’s a process, but at least the work has begun in earnest.

Here’s what Donald Appleyard said about the tension over street design:

People have always lived on streets. They have been the places where children first learned about the world, where neighbors met, the social centers of towns and cities, the rallying points for revolts, the scenes of repression…. The street has always been the scene of this conflict, between living and access, between resident and traveler, between street life and the threat of death.

Appleyard would likely be thrilled to see how his ideas are being taken up by a new generation. Sadly, he’s not around to do so. He was struck by a car and killed in 1982.

Sarah Goodyear is Grist’s cities editor. She’s also on Twitter.

I woke up with this in my head this morning. Enjoy!

Lyrics | Bill Withers lyrics – Lean On Me lyrics

Congo Update: City of Joy and the Stop Raping Our Greatest Resource Campaign

Construction at the City of Joy: Construction work on the City of Joy continues in Bukavu, with each day bringing progress. Almost all of the ten houses, the administration building, dining room, and class rooms now have a roof and the construction crew have begun laying the floors, putting in the ceilings, as well as the installation for electricity and water. The security wall around City of Joy is almost finished. V-Day’s Congo Director/Director of City of Joy Christine Schuler Deschryver has begun working with local carpenters to start the building of furniture – all of the beds, chairs, etc. will be made by local craftsmen. All of this has taken place amidst an incredibly heavy rainy season and a series of delays with the construction crew and material shortages due to the regional conflict taking place in Eastern Congo. Our Congo team has been ‘moving mountains’ each and every day to actualize our dream, and the City of Joy will soon be a reality!

Read more at V-Day and watch a video about the building of the city.