The Joys of City Life

The word “civilization” means nothing more than “making into cities.” Everything we think of as glorious about human achievement was made possible by the city: art, architecture, music, theater, literature. Without the city, all those things languish in a primitive state; in the city, they grow and flourish. In agrarian villages, no one can be completely spared from the work of feeding and protecting the community. A certain uniformity is enforced by circumstance. It is the city that tolerates and coddles eccentricity. And it is eccentricity that creates civilization. After all, there would be no art or culture at all if someone hadn’t dared to stand out from the crowd.

That’s all true, you might say, but do we still need the city now? After all, what made the city essential for civilization was the simple lack of any decent long-distance communication, wasn’t it? People had to gather in large groups to support the arts back then, but now we have television.

The answer to that, of course, is that, if television were really all we needed, we wouldn’t have invented the shopping mall.

Shopping malls are a curious phenomenon. When second-generation suburbanites, having no memory of real city life, began to fear the city as something strange and frightening, they still found the suburbs inadequate. It’s as though there was some primal race-memory still lodged in their brains—a memory of a place where people gathered to do their shopping, but more than that to be with other people and enjoy a respite from the isolation of home life. It must have been something like a city—but not actually a city, of course, because cities are dirty and dangerous and filled up with the dregs of society, aren’t they? So suburbanites created the shopping mall, a plastic model of a city business district.

Why do suburbanites hate the city and love the mall? Ask them sometime. I’ve had anti-urban suburbanites tell me that the city is full of scary people (but if there’s anything scarier than a platoon of teenage mall chicks flaunting their pierced navels, it doesn’t grow in my city), or that there’s no place to park in the city (but how many blocks’ worth of parking lot—with no sidewalks—do you have to hike through at the mall?), or that it takes forever to get downtown (but I can read a book if the streetcar is slow—something you can’t do if you’re stuck in a half-hour traffic jam headed for the mall).

I think the real reason, though, is something else. I think the city still does its job today: it brings a huge variety of eccentrics together–people with different ideas, different cultures, different ambitions—and puts them on prominent display. That’s deeply unsettling to someone who thinks his own culture has it right. As long as you don’t have to face those eccentrics who are still going about the business of building civilization, you don’t have to face the possibility that there might be more to life than television and shopping malls. For obvious commercial reasons, the malls don’t encourage that kind of revelation. But the city does. It can be unsettling. But once you develop a taste for the riches of civilization, the mall seems empty. We still need the city, even in the age of the Internet. The sooner we realize that, the sooner we can go about the business of rescuing civilization from the stifling grip of the suburbs.

A poem by James Parton Haney, printed in the American Magazine of Art, July, 1917.

WHAT is it makes my city—not her towers,
Her marts or wharves, her teeming tenements.
These be but parts, something transcends them all,
A spirit thing—an essence, genius, soul —
Which wakens through her moil to consciousness,
And whispers to her peoples, that she lives.
All those that love her she bids band themselves
To work together that she gain in grace,
To work together that she stand secure,
’Gainst evils which would rob her of her fame;
To work, until each worker comes to see
Her very self as builded not of stone,
But a vast structure made of conscious clay
And dumbly voiceless only to the dumb.
This living thing, my city seems to me —
So proud she stands — so splendid on her hills.

I call them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Aluminum, Vinyl, Insulbrick, and Permastone. They’re the four most common disasters that befall the exteriors of otherwise respectable houses. Pittsburgh seems to have been more susceptible to them than most cities, perhaps because Pittsburgh’s unshakable belief in Progress rendered anything “modern” attractive.

If bad taste were a crime, then Insulbrick would be a felony. From a distance, it looks almost something like bricks, if you squint a bit. Actually, it’s thin sheets stamped with a brick pattern. You attach them to the side of a frame house, and instantly your frame house is transformed into a frame house with a shell of cartoon bricks. Then, of course, you leave it there, because the dealer told you it would last forever. And it will. It will flake and curl, the seams will become more and more obvious, and the surface will collect every particle of soot from the atmosphere, but the stuff will last forever. It won’t completely die on its own, and no one has the good sense and compassion to euthanize it.

But as bad as Insulbrick is, Permastone is worse. Insulbrick at least aspires to look bricklike; Permastone has no such base and common aspiration. It aims at nothing less than complete and utter picturesqueness. It fails completely, of course. At its best, it looks as though someone accidentally ran a Belgian-block pavement up the side of a house. At its worst, it looks as though someone drew a Belgian-block pavement on the side of the house with crayons.

Aluminum is hideous, too: offensively artificial when it’s young, and dreadfully decrepit-looking when—in spite of the dealer’s promise that it would be immortal—it starts to decay. And as for Vinyl, the best that can be said for it is that, unlike any of the other three horsemen, it comes in the same shape as the boards it replaces—in the same way that a department-store mannequin comes in the same shape as a real woman.

Some day, when the world wakes from its siding nightmare, all these things will disappear from the landscape. Come the revolution, real wood, real bricks, and real stone will once again be the only materials considered suitable for covering a house. When that happens, I hope Spring Garden is preserved as a sort of Architectural Holocaust Museum, a constant reminder that we must never allow such things to happen again.

Spring Garden is a wonderful neighborhood. Squashed into a narrow valley, its tall, narrow houses grow in an eclectic assortment of shapes along a few narrow streets that can never quite meet at right angles. And what a wonderful collection of really hideous siding!

You enter the Spring Garden Valley from Dutchtown on Spring Garden Avenue, which leaves the flats of the North Side to meander in the hollow. And the first house you notice—you can’t help noticing it—is covered not with one of the Four Horsemen, but with one of their predecessors: hexagonal asbestos tiles. Unlike the Four Horsemen, asbestos tiles like these have the one merit that they’re not imitating anything. They’re simply being themselves, proudly displaying their complete dissimilarity to any traditional building material. They came in all sorts of garish colors, now muted by decades of soot. Occasionally a particularly ambitious homeowner would mix the colors, creating a sort of abstract-expressionist mosaic.

Drive further down Spring Garden Avenue, and you’ll see every variety of artificial siding ever conceived by the ingenuity of the building industry. The Four Horsemen are all there in lush abundance. If you keep looking, you may even see that peculiar 1970s horror, vertical-board siding (stained in “natural” colors, of course, never painted). Mixed in with the houses are bars and small shops, each vying with the houses for the worst-siding honors, and sometimes surpassing them.

One block to the west is High Street, which hugs the side of the bluff that lowers above the neighborhood. Here the scene is more domestic: the street is narrower, and there are no shops, only houses facing each other at close range. Here you might begin to get a sense that Spring Garden is more than a collection of bad siding. It’s a neighborhood full of good families, raising a generation of children who will one day buy other houses in the neighborhood and replace their ugly old siding with crisp new ugly siding.

In fact, the more you see of the bad siding in Spring Garden, the more you’ll realize that it’s a sign not so much of bad taste as of life and vitality. The old houses could be beautiful if they were restored–much more beautiful, probably, than they ever were in the late Victorian era when they were built. But they’re not restored. The neighborhood never decayed far enough to be “restored”; it’s still full of good, honest people who take pride in their houses. Only a house that is loved gets a coat of ugly siding.

At any rate, I hope restoration never hits Spring Garden. I’d love to see Lawrenceville rid of its ugly coats of aluminum and vinyl, and maybe even Bloomfield; but Spring Garden is perfect as it is. Meanwhile, if anyone ever decides to write the definitive book on ugly siding materials, I volunteer to take the pictures. In Spring Garden, it would be no more than an afternoon’s work to find every bad siding ever invented.

The virtues of the village are much praised these days by people who consider themselves enlightened. And that is good and right. We have an urgent need of villages these days—small communities where neighbors recognize that the mythical nuclear family is not so self-sufficient as some of our moralists would have us believe. It really does take more than the family to rear a child, or even to keep a house in repair. In our modern world, we most often rely on paid help to take care of the things we can’t do ourselves. But how much better for our children—or for our houses—if we can leave them in the hands of neighbors who will have to live with them!

But the village is not everything. We need the village, but our world has an urgent need of cities, too. Not the soulless suburbs, which are neither city nor village. Most modern suburbs are designed to maintain the artificial isolation of the individual family; the very architecture of the suburban house—with its garage facing the front and its deck or patio facing the rear—emphasizes and reinforces that isolation. No, what we need are real cities, which encourage people to meet, and in fact demand that they meet.

What is the difference between a city and a village? The city is not just a village grown big. The difference is more than one of size. It’s a matter of culture. The easiest and baldest way to state it is this: the village rejects outsiders, but the city expects and welcomes them.

The city becomes a city precisely when it has room for outsiders. In the village, life can be peaceful and happy, but it must necessarily be homogeneous. Diversity is the mark of the city. Those outsiders bring with them their different cultures and languages, different ways of seeing the world—different possibilities, in other words.

The large number of people in a city, even without the influx of outsiders, encourages diversity. A village might support a blacksmith, but could it support an engraver or a tapestry-weaver? Arts like those are superflous in village life, and the village cannot support what is superfluous. Only in the city do they become not only possible but necessary. With the vast population of the city, the single citizen can become more than a villager. It is the city that gives us the chance to develop our minds and spirits.

It takes a village to raise a child. But it takes a city to make that child a really human adult.