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Queens, NY – The idea was to design an English village from scratch, within railroad-commuting distance of Manhattan.  It was meant to include homes for families of different income levels, and so in addition to the big houses, there are apartments in handsome buildings near Station Square, attached townhouses, and two-family houses like the one I live in. Forest Hills Gardens is, as it was designed to be, lovely.  What my great-grandparents bought, in the 1920s, was a piece of the Garden City movement, one of the first attempts at a planned community in America; Station Square was to house a bustling shopping area, and the churches and the public elementary school were put in to round out the community.  All five of the children in my grandmother’s generation went to PS 101, as well as many in my mother’s generation; at family reunions, everyone who went there stands up and recites the Ephebic Oath. You apparently had to learn this by heart when graduating from eighth grade, although the variant my family recites is a bit quirky, and (per my grandmother) has to be said in a very particular, Katherine Hepburn-like mid-Atlantic accent.  It begins something like “We, the graduates of PS 101, upon receiving our diplomas from the City, now affirm our commitment to her;”  and it ends “…and we will strive to transmit the City greater, better, and more beautiful than she was transmitted to us.”

When I take a run towards Forest Park, I pass the church where my grandparents were married; I pass the shrieking kids on the PS 101 schoolyard; and I pass the alley behind the schoolyard where, in the ’60′s, my Uncle David, age eleven or so, once stood guard over a piece of dry ice that had fallen off of a delivery truck and was steaming and foaming in a puddle that had formed in the dip of the road.  He felt that the ice was a public danger, and he was, that year, Captain of the Safeties.  Since then my Uncle David has spent a career as an environmental lawyer fighting GE’s refusal to dredge the Hudson River; when it rains, that puddle still reappears.

Station Square is not any kind of commercial center, although there is a Thai restaurant and a nail salon and a dry cleaner’s, as well as Dirty Pierre’s, a little bar in the pigeon-haunted underpass that defines one edge of the square.  People sit at little tables outside Dirty Pierre’s during every month of the year with their dogs and, in the case of one woman, a parrot; in the winter, the proprietors decorate with a huge inflatable Santa Claus.  But shopping within the Gardens is a nonstarter, if you do not want to buy mixed drinks, French manicures, cold storage for furs, or chicken satay.  Instead I do my shopping at the SS Natural on Austin Street, which is run by Uighurs and patronized by Ukrainian matrons.

Oh, but it’s private.  The NYPD does not patrol: we have a mercenary outfit instead, called Epic Security.  Until just before I was born it was in fact what is politely called a “restricted community;” when, in 1966 or so, my father came to the house to meet the family, my great-grandfather (according to family legend) looked at him and said “So. You’re the Jew.” It is still predominately WASP, but on Saturdays, the Orthodox papas lead their old-world families through the streets as a detour on their way to and from synagogue.

Early last fall, we had what my family has taken to calling the stormado.  It ripped up trees by their roots — huge old oaks that had been planted exactly where the younger Olmstead had wanted them — and sent branches crashing through roofs.  My uncles descended on the house the weekend afterward, delighted at the chance to use chainsaws, and turned the tree that had fallen on our roof into manageable chunks.  I persuaded them to stack these on the front lawn, and put a sign on the stack saying that this was the communal firewood pile for the street; anyone who wanted to get their own windfall wood off their lawn could stack it there, and then take wood from the stack to burn as they needed it.

I was spoken to by a neighbor lady.  ”This is not West Virginia,” she said.  “You cannot have a woodpile on the front lawn.” For about five minutes I was angry, embarrassed; I had fantasies of moving to Rego Park in protest.  But she was just telling the truth.  Her family is used to antisocial behavior from mine; her husband told me about one of my uncles storming through his leaf pile, once, forty years ago.  My cousin came by later on to help finish splitting the sections of the tree into firewood in exchange for stabling his motorcycle in the garage for the winter. Now the wood is stacked against the side of the house; after fourteen months of seasoning, it’s just about ready to burn.

– Susannah Black

FPR is looking for portraits of life in your communities, no matter how plain or quotidian. Want to share one? Just e-mail a photograph of the view from – not of – your front porch to frontporchviews@gmail.com, together with a brief written reflection. Writing may be lightly edited. We’ll gladly withhold your name if you ask us to.

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Nashville, Tennessee — This is a tale of two neighborhoods, a move from one to the other, and the inherent contradictions of gentrification.

Our old neighborhood, close to downtown, was one of Nashville’s first “streetcar suburbs,” full of cottage-style homes built in the 1920′s.  The houses all have front porches and big trees, and all the streets in the grid have sidewalks and street parking.  There are three universities within a two-mile radius.  The recent past reveals a now-common story: the introduction of the interstate highway in the 1960′s enabled white flight in the 70′s, followed by increasing crime and decay in the 80′s and 90′s.  Yet in the last decade gentrification took hold, and now along the thoroughfares car lots and roofing companies have been replaced by fair-trade coffee shops, vintage clothing stores, and cocktail restaurants featuring grass-fed burgers.  The city has invested in major street improvements, including human-scale lighting, and imposed mixed-use codes on new commercial developments.  We were even featured recently in Martha Stewart Living.  Sounds like an urban localist’s dream, right?

The developer must have thought so, too, when he purchased the property our rather shoddy 1980′s rental duplex sat on.  We were given very attractive incentives to be out in 30 days, with further instructions not to bother with cleaning.  In other words: demo job.  The new landlord is betting that this property will be worth much more with large single-family homes or townhouses on it, and he is correct. The search for a comparable rental in the same area made it clear that we had been living in this neighborhood on borrowed time: one apartment manager simply laughed at me when I told her the sort of terms we were looking for.  Thus, finding affordable housing meant, for us, pushing further out from the urban core.

Our new neighborhood, to my knowledge, has not been featured in any magazines.  The main thoroughfare consists of several miles of used car lots, pay-day advances, discount beer and tobacco markets, wireless resellers, and auto repair shops.  Signs are as likely to be in Spanish as in English.  For pedestrians, there are sidewalks on the main road, if you don’t mind 45 MPH traffic and frequent curb cuts, but not on most of the residential side roads.  Commuting to work is now an exercise in psychological fortitude against the concrete jungle.

All of this paints a grim picture, but there are also signs of hope.  The houses on our new street were also built before World War II, and though they are not as large nor as fancy as those in the old neighborhood, they still feature front porches and an established tree canopy.  We now have our own porch with a swing and an excellent view of the Western sky.  The streets are arranged in a grid, and along with the other businesses nearby there are locally-owned grocery and hardware stores.

This brings me to the ambiguities of gentrification. Our old neighborhood may have been the most “walkable” in Nashville, but we considered it a luxury to visit one of the area establishments for coffee or dinner, and rarely did so. Now, within sight of our front door we have a permanent taco stand, a Greek diner, and barbecue takeout, all of which are both delicious and affordable. The surprising result is that, despite its less-than-ideal character, we are far more likely to be found inhabiting the public spaces in our new neighborhood than our old one.

The situation has raised many questions for me.  Why is there such a strong correlation between wealth and good civic design?  Zoning laws are fundamentally just words; why do the poor get different ones from the rich?  Must a place be beautiful before you can love it?  What prevents less wealthy communities from making the changes that will gradually reshape their public spaces on a human scale?  If they manage to do this, is it inevitable that they will price themselves out of their own neighborhoods, their own homes?

These are questions I hope my wife and I will have many opportunities to ponder while swinging on our front porch in the coming evenings, but moreso I hope that we’ll be grateful for the blessings of a roof, a family, a bright sunset in the Western sky, and delicious 99-cent tacos from the stand next door.

– Justin Gregory

FPR is looking for portraits of life in your communities, no matter how plain or quotidian. Want to share one? Just e-mail a photograph of the view from – not of – your front porch to frontporchviews@gmail.com, together with a written reflection of no more than a few hundred words. Writing may be lightly edited. We’ll gladly withhold your name if you ask us to.

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Mayville, North Dakota

Mayville, North Dakota – You’re looking northwest from our front porch in Mayville, North Dakota.  The picture, taken Sunday afternoon, November 13, casts doubt on what everyone knows about the state.  Where is all the snow?  It’s too soon to say for sure, but I’m wondering if the famous long winters are a thing of the past.

A concrete path runs from our house to the sidewalk.  Most streets in Mayville have sidewalks.  Many blocks also have alleys — and I don’t think FPR has yet celebrated the pleasures of alley-rambling, perhaps because walking in alleys would not be pleasant in most American locales.  In Mayville alleys are good places to look for purple harebells and white-flowered mayweed, which are much easier to find than graffiti.  The best place to see graffiti is on the sides of Burlington Northern boxcars when they settle across Second Street, on their way to or from one of the grain elevators downtown.  The railroad tracks are about a block from the heart of town, which is Paula’s Cafe and Steak House.  The smallest, cutest little downtown Carnegie library you’ve ever seen is open about 15  hours a week, but any community member may make free use of the university’s interlibrary loan service.

Our house is where the Campus-Community Reading Group was founded in January 2000.  We started with The Brothers Karamazov and in the group’s eleven years we read a bunch more Dostoevsky, Tolstoy’s two longest novels, at least half a dozen Dickens and many other Victorian novels, and also the entire Divine Comedy.  We read a few novels by Joseph Conrad but he was about as contemporary as we wished to get.  Most of the time we had our book conversations at Mayville State University, whose Wikipedia entry reports full-time 2008 enrollment of 449.

– Dale Nelson

FPR is looking for portraits of life in your communities, no matter how plain or quotidian. Want to share one? Just e-mail a photograph of the view from – not of – your front porch to frontporchviews@gmail.com, together with a written reflection of no more than a few hundred words. Writing may be lightly edited. We’ll gladly withhold your name if you ask us to.

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3. The View From Your Front Porch Queens, NY –… The idea was to design an English...

Lincoln, Nebraska — When I first read about FPR’s View from Your Porch series, I immediately decided to submit something. Then I thought about the view from my front porch. Like much of Nebraska, its beauty doesn’t announce itself. You have to wait for it. There’s a public school with a bland brick facade directly across from us, and most of the homes on either side aren’t well maintained by their owners. When I thought of that view and compared it to the sort of idyllic small-town rural vistas I imagined FPR readers enjoying, my own place seemed tawdry, dirty, and oh-so-modern in comparison. As an added bonus, my neighborhood is one of Lincoln’s poorest, and my apartment is within 50 feet of the governor’s mansion and about 200 feet of the state capitol. I don’t know a better metaphor for the state of our body politic.

But the more I sit on my porch the more I feel secure about my place. I’m reminded of Wendell Berry’s warning against wishing for the life — and I think we can extend that to include the place – of another. There’s a certain loveliness to Lincoln’s near south, especially in the fall. The trees here are old, “and their roots go deep.” (That’s Tolkien describing Fangorn, but I sometimes suspect the midwest is similarly-haunted. I think Willa Cather and Marilynne Robinson would agree.) In their autumn colors they have a kind of aged splendor about them, the beauty of a wizened old woman dressed her best. And while it’s true that the houses could be cleaned up a bit, there’s a certain charm to their obviously lived-in appearance. These houses aren’t built to impress, aren’t intended primarily for the owners to put on airs or flaunt their wealth and accomplishments. They’re places where people live. And they look it. In a way, that waited-on beauty and lack of pretension might sum up my home state better than anything else I know.

– Jake Meador

FPR is looking for portraits of life in your communities, no matter how plain or quotidian. Want to share one? Just e-mail a photograph of the view from – not of – your front porch to frontporchviews@gmail.com, together with a written reflection of no more than a few hundred words. Writing may be lightly edited. We’ll gladly withhold your name if you ask us to.

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2. The View From Your Front Porch Mayville, North Dakota –… You’re looking northwest from our front...
3. The View From Your Front Porch Phoenix, Arizona — …Looking east from our front porch in...

Phoenix, Arizona — Looking east from our front porch in Willo, you see the results of one of Phoenix’s bigger Big Mistakes: the distant office towers on Central Avenue.

Those towers mark the Phoenix “uptown” area (not that anyone calls it that). Slicing through Phoenix’s historic neighborhoods, Central Avenue could have, and should have, been developed with three- to five-story mixed-use buildings forming a more or less continuous street wall on both sides of the road. This would have made for a very handsome corridor leading from the downtown district to the lovely central-Phoenix suburban neighorhoods to the north.

Instead, we got this: Two rows of isolated towers hovering menacingly over residential streets filled with “transitional ranches” (encouraged by FHA lending practices), Tudor revivals, Spanish colonials, and a pleasingly eclectic mix of other styles. These walkable, bikeable neighborhoods are lovely; without the incongruous towers on Central Avenue they would have been much better.

Historic? Yes, the houses across the street here were built, like ours, circa 1940. That passes for historic in Phoenix. In 1940, Phoenix was not even among the most populous 100 cities in America, which means that its population was less than 88,000 people. (Such metropoloi as Allentown, South Bend, Wilmington (DE), and Duluth are on the 1940 top 100 list.)

Then came — not air conditioning, which had been here for a while — but the war, and with it dozens of military installations, air bases, and prisoner-of-war and Japanese internment camps. The boys liked it so much here they came often back to stay (not many of the Japanese seem to have felt that way). Today, Phoenix is the sixth largest city in the U.S.

There was, of course, no worse time in the history of humanity for a city to take shape than in the years 1945 to . . . well, about yesterday, probably. But our old neighborhood was built just in time. It is graced with small houses, front porches, sidewalks, alleys, mature trees (that’s a noble Aleppo pine across the street, and the edge of our juniper in the foreground), and swaying palms.

Even grass, to the surprise of many of our eastern friends. It is a dull yellow-green now, but the winter seeding was just done, so the lawn will be emerald green in a month or so. It will stay that way until sometime in May.

Hey, just keep that Colorado River water coming. Thanks, Barry!

– Jeremy Beer

FPR is looking for portraits of life in your communities, no matter how plain or quotidian. Want to share one? Just e-mail a photograph of the view from – not of – your front porch to frontporchviews@gmail.com, together with a written reflection of no more than a few hundred words. Writing may be lightly edited. We’ll gladly withhold your name if you ask us to.

Related posts:

1. The View From Your Front Porch Emmitsburg, Maryland …- You can tell it’s a small town...
2. The View From Your Front Porch Lincoln, Nebraska — …When I first read about FPR’s View...
3. The View From Your Front Porch Mayville, North Dakota –… You’re looking northwest from our front...