The uses of sidewalks
I made a pilgrimage to Boston's North End on Sunday with the hope of being able to read Jane Jacobs there, and I managed to.
When I saw the North End again in 1959, I was amazed at the change. Dozens and dozens of buildings had been rehabilitated. Instead of mattresses against the windows there were Venetian blinds and glimpses of fresh paint. Many of the small, converted houses now had only one or two families in them instead of the old crowded three or four. Some of the families in the tenements (as I learned later, visiting inside) had uncrowded themselves by throwing two older apartments together, and had equipped these with bathrooms, new kitchens and the like. I looked down a narrow alley, thinking to find at least here the old, squalid North End, but no: more neatly repointed brickwork, new blinds, and a burst of music as a door opened. Indeed, this was the only city district I had ever seen -- or have seen to this day -- in which the sides of buildings around parking lots had not been left raw and amputated, but repaired and painted as neatly as if they were intended to be seen. Mingled all among the buildings for living were an incredible number of splendid food stores, as well as such enterprises as upholstery making, metal working, carpentry, food processing. The streets were alive with children playing, people shopping, people stolling, people talking. Had it not been a cold January day, there would surely have been people sitting.
I was about the only person sitting outside on Sunday, with my copy of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, reading about what the neighborhood used to be like. The North End has changed quite a bit since Jane Jacobs wrote in praise of it; as she suggests elsewhere in the book, a successful neighborhood like that seems to attract wealthy people who enjoy what it has to offer and can afford to outbid other people. Among other things, it's possible that a many of the current set of shops were built in imitation of older shops and to evoke nostalgia for past versions of the North End. There are a lot of relatively fancy Italian restaurants, seemingly many more per capita than Jane Jacobs recounts, and possibly they are there partly because the North End has become a real tourist destination. (North Beach in San Francisco is certainly like that; it couldn't support all those restaurants unless people from out of town thought of it as "the Italian neighborhood" and made a point of coming to San Francisco to eat in North Beach!)
I'm sure that the general architecture and street layout is much the same as it was in 1959 and that almost all of the buildings now standing in the North End were there then. The economic and demographic scene is surely much different. I get a sense of gentrification, although it isn't taken to the same extremes as elsewhere; here in the Mission, for example, they've been building pretty ugly condos, which I didn't see in the North End. The availability of money for mortgages, construction projects, etc., is totally turned around. (The Death and Life of Great American Cities talks about how commercial lenders wouldn't lend into the North End in the 1950s because it had a bad reputation, so people living there found alternatives to the major banks. Three minutes into my walk through the North End on Sunday, I saw a construction site with a big banner proclaiming that the project was financed by a large New York bank.) However, the themes of diversity and sidewalk use are still in evidence. In fact, I didn't even know how to get to the North End (I don't know Boston that well), so I decided to walk toward what looked interesting, and sure enough, it turned out to be the North End. However much the economic situation has changed and however well or poorly planners and builders have taken The Death and Life of Great American Cities to heart, the North End still looks like an interesting place, and you can still see that interest from afar, fifty years later.
