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Keep Off the GrassNovember 03, 2009 Another one from To Be Rather Than to Seem. Is it one piece or two? I'm not sure. I decided against including "The Park," which I'll post tomorrow. It's related, but not closely enough. My inclination is to keep the pieces short and discrete no matter how thematically related they are. That way I can range and rearrange them. When it comes to my life, everything's thematically related; all roads lead to and from ME. But that doesn't mean they all belong in the same essay. I'm thinking of Land Trust, by island artist Don Sibley. Land Trust comprises two dozen or so small landscape paintings that can be fitted together in various ways to create different larger landscapes. I was fascinated when I first saw it. I was features editor of the Martha's Vineyard Times. It was first hung at Doug Parker's wonderful On the Vineyard gallery. It makes its permanent home in the lobby of the high school's performing artis center. Walk up O Street, with two-story rowhouses on either side, cross 37th, and pass between the stone pillars that mark the entrance to Georgetown University. You're standing at the edge of a small traffic circle near the middle of a expansive oblong lawn; around most of its perimeter, this lawn is edged with asphalt walkways, wide enough for service vehicles to pass. Across the circle and directly ahead is Healy Hall, an ornate four-story structure that breathes "collegiate" from every cranny, cornice, and ceremonial staircase. At the rightmost end of the oblong stands White-Gravenor Hall, equally stolid, somewhat newer, and perhaps a tad more ecclesiastical. Between the two on the long side of the lawn is Copley Hall. Occupying the left end of the oblong is Lauinger Library, by far the newest and most modern of the buildings visible from Georgetown's main gate. Lauinger Library opened toward the end of my freshman year, about a month before the Kent State shootings shut the campus down. Within a very few weeks footpaths had appeared across the green lawn fronting the library, one leading from the main gate, the other from the corner of Healy Hall where foot traffic from several dorms and classroom buildings converged. Imagine a terrestrial ice cream cone, with the traffic circle standing in for one scoop of your favorite flavor and the tip at the library's front door. While war raged in Southeast Asia and anti-war fought it across the United States and around the world, university officials battled the entire student body over the right way to walk to the library. The officials contended that we should follow the existing asphalt walkway around the perimeter of the lawn. Our footsteps, in their hundreds, then thousands and tens of thousands, countered that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line. Our footsteps carried the day. Officialdom conceded, and the foot-beaten paths were enshrined in asphalt. * * * I didn't graduate from Georgetown. The antiwar movement was ebbing, and with it went my commitment to staying in Washington. After more than two years of intense opposition to U.S. policy, I couldn't see myself ever working for the U.S. government or representing its interests abroad. What else could I do with an Arabic major? Thanks to the women's liberation movement, I was finally asking myself what credibility I as a woman could ever have in the Arab world. Many antiwarriors saw the U.S. as a gigantic bulldozer crushing the rest of the world under its treads, with the operators in the cockpit so high up that they could choose not to see the damage their behemoth was doing. In this scenario we were the nuts and bolts, the pipes and welds, the steel, rubber, and plastic, that kept the machine in good working order. Our job was to make it break down. I had thought to organize my life around foreign service; now I believed that my work would be done at home. I aborted my junior year halfway through, spent tax season working as a receptionist for H & R Block, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. In the years just preceding my arrival, Penn had constructed the Superblock, an area at one end of the campus that was built to house undergraduate students. Superblock was dominated by two twenty-six-story buildings that no one ever called by their names (Harrison and Harnwell -- I just looked it up): they were "High-Rise South" and "High-Rise East." From my bedroom window in one of the low-rise dorms, I could see both High South and High East, tall towers of cool concrete by day, glittering pillars of light by night. The skyscraping dorms had been open for two years. Their problems were much discussed around campus: anonymity, vandalism, and even violence, including rape and attempted rape. Around this time I read Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. What led me to it? I'm not sure. It wasn't in the syllabus for any course I was taking. My friends and colleagues weren't reading and buzzing about it: Death and Life had been published in 1961, so it wasn't new, though it certainly was still alive and in print. I'm inclined to blame the encounter on my father, an architect involved in Boston city planning -- and a Jacobs admirer. Jane Jacobs told me to look for the public spaces in those high-rise dorms: Where were they? How were they being used? Were they being used? Aha. In the new style of the time, the dorms were organized in apartments. You got to know your roommates well, without knowing who else lived on your floor. Each building had a rooftop lounge, and both lounges were usually nearly empty. Why? They weren't on the way to anywhere. People didn't pass through them; they had to make a special trip. On the ground floor, true, there were waiting areas off to the side, with chairs and sofas to sit on, but people didn't tarry there either. We passed from the front door to the elevators as if we had blinders on, looking neither right nor left. In practice, the one space that students from all apartments and all floors shared was -- the elevators. Elevators are rarely great fosterers of conversation and community, and those in Penn's high-rises were no exception. Human footsteps, like water, will find the easiest route from one place to another. Plans that acknowledge and accommodate the natural flow are more likely to succeed. Plans that seek to coerce or obstruct it require much more effort, and often produce unpleasant side effects.
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