Community, Neighborhood

Neighborhood. That's become an important concept in my life since I moved to Dayton's Bluff in the spring of 2000. Neighborhood, community - how many meanings, how varied, what boundaries, who is included, how accepting, and how emotionally integrated are those who live within the confines. What is it that creates a neighborhood or a community? Is it a police grid, defined city districts or wards, the end of a comfortable block, or just those with whom we are comfortable? Are the boundaries physical as major streets, perhaps the heaviest traffic areas? Is a neighborhood as small as the closest neighbors, perhaps four houses that connect with my own? Does it extend to the kids I know, whether at the end of the next block or two doors down? Is it a physical boundary or is a neighborhood made up of the people I actually know.

I've found that my own conversational definition of 'neighborhood' changes depending on.... My neighborhood sometimes extends to the Payne/Phalen area where some of my favorite people meet at Polly's Coffee Cove on Saturday morning for round table discussions and solutions to community problems...or up to Suburban, including Byerley's restaurant, where they know exactly how I like my poached eggs on a weekday morning; though I don't personally know any other customers there, I enjoy eavesdropping, and know many details about family, friends, jobs, and love life. At other times my neighborhood narrows to the two or three blocks in any direction of my home.

Local coffee shops become communities and even families, sometimes quite close knit. Recently, I've heard several 'community' references made to places where people gather even on a temporary basis such as a group waiting for an event. At a recent discussion a woman repeatedly identified a local bar as her community, though, she said it was difficult to get to know anyone there. While others in the large group exchanged ideas for their neighborhood communities, she consistently returned to the bar community. Comfort zone? Isolation outside of the bar?

Community to me is probably more intangible than my neighborhood. Community is at least in part, the attitude of a collected people and how they interact with each other. Community - individuals as well as the 'sense' they create.

Part of this thinking came about yesterday evening when three of us were out picking up trash on Conway, between Maria and Bates Street. It's one short block that too often looks, as one person described it, 'a devastated third world country'. My own block looks like a ghost town with a minimum of litter to pick up and, with all the boarded houses, no overflowing garbage bins.

When I drive down this block of Conway, I do get an eerie feeling as if I'm very far removed from my own life. Shari/Sherry (sp) at the Thursday DC4 meeting mentioned this block and three of us at that moment agreed to meet Friday evening to clean it. Amazing things can happen in one short hour! With guerrilla gardening, why not guerrilla clean-up? I can do it when I feel the urge and have a high energy level...without a doubt, my legs hurt for two days afterward!

Though I often contemplate the concept of community, this came more recently to mind with our Conway clean-up. Of three of us, I was first to arrive. A young man double parked and began blaring his horn. I approached him and asked if he wanted someone to come out from the house. He angrily told me that someone was in his driveway...that they were often parked there. I asked him if he had talked with them about it, and informed him that it was actually illegal to sound his horn except in an emergency. When I asked who his landlord was, and suggested he talk to the landlord, he hemmed and hawed. Upon more conversation, it's his girlfriend's apartment, not his. Therefore, it's not even his driveway!!! He did park at the curb, and didn't honk again until about 45 minutes later...when he squealed off, sounding his horn for me. Ahhh, civility!

At the house next door to his girlfriend, there was an empty garbage bin in the street. On the grass at the curb was a pile about three feet high and spreading over about eight feet out of pizza boxes, an old, artificial Christmas tree, miscellaneous 'stuff' clothes, and scattered litter. It had rained all day, so everything was soppy wet and further falling apart. Once the sun dried it all out, the trash would be flying for blocks around. I went to the door and said I was with a neighborhood cleaning crew from Dayton's Bluff. I said that I see that the garbage service didn't pick up everything and if they needed help, I would be glad to help them. 'No', their landlord would be out to do it, the woman said. I asked her if she knew that if the city knew this was here, her landlord would receive a big fine. Oddly enough, within the hour, everything was picked up.

Across the street, as we picked up broken glass bottles, the pieces well embedded into the wet soil - I couldn't help but remember when my youngest sister, Gail, was a toddler, she walked into a puddle and severely cut the sole of her foot. We lived in a rural area at the time, no car, and while I held Gail still, my mother stitched her foot with household thread. How could people in this neighborhood disregard the safety of all the children who darted about? A young woman came to the door. She was cradling a baby. She thanked us and asked why. I understand that a young mother would not possibly have time or facility to be picking up litter in her front yard...but the man who came and stood behind her?

At the corner, a man came out and asked what we were doing. When Sherry told him, he said that was for his landlord to do. He smiled, glad that it was being cleaned. My whole thought to this is the line drawn between a landlord's responsibilities and a tenant's...and the blurry grey area. When I've mentioned it to others, some have said it's because when some people rent, they feel no responsibility for the property, especially outside the walls of the dwelling. There's much, of course, connected to that: resentment of the landlord for lack of maintenance response, high rents a person may feel sucked into. I'm not saying it's right, just that it exists.

Perhaps the renter lives only within the walls of the apartment, duplex, or house. Going from the door to the car, to the bus stop, to the store is simply no different than walking through a parking lot at Target. It's an access. How many times do you see people picking up litter in a parking lot?

I'm a renter. For about ten years before we divorced, my husband and I owned a home. My parents were renters all their lives. I can remember times as a child when my world was only within the walls of the apartment; when we didn't dare go outside except to go elsewhere, not to play or visit near our home. But I also remember, as a family of seven (five kids) living in a one room motel-like unit for about a year, planting watermelon seeds outside, in a 'garden' my sister and I dug up with a soup spoon. Surely, we didn't 'garden' because we cared as 10- and 5-year olds about 'improving' the landscape of this gravel-covered 'yard'. I don't know what we wanted - to see something grow, to see results of planting seeds, to nurture something? We had seldom been really attached to a neighborhood. Perhaps we were seeking that attachment to something outside of the way we hid ourselves from 'normal' people?

I can see this - the lack of attachment - in some of my neighbors. Next door there are those who visit on the porch and have somewhat of a connection to people who walk by. Then there are those who simply walk from their door, to the waiting car, and they casually toss their garbage over the fence and into our yard. I ask myself, how welcoming are people who own homes in my neighborhood...the block group that existed some years ago was made up only of a few homeowners...by invitation...that was also their 'national night out'. I often would hear renters as a group, disparaged at neighborhood meetings. I would hope it's 'only' because the persons speaking had in their minds a specific behavior they were attaching to a group and they were so focused in their anger, they couldn't see beyond. I had said at one meeting that if they substituted 'Black' or 'Asian', they could be accused of racism.

Perhaps if our district or neighbors offered to help disenfranchised renters to set up a raised garden or encouraged the landlord/property owner to do some landscaping (this instead of always calling Code Enforcement or not contacting the landlord. Perhaps if neighbors could look at their neighbors who could use a hand in planting, in connecting with the outside we could establish better relationships and build a community. Community = caring about your neighbor, not just your friends. Community = extending yourself. Community = building from within, one to one relationships and spreading to include others.

sh 4/10/2000