by Eric Miller
A good neighbor died February 26, at age 74. Fred Rogers was a "neighbor" who visited generations of American children, taking them into an idealized neighborhood where neighbors knew each other and neighborhoods were supportive systems rather than sterile subdivisions.
Mr. Rogers' neighborhood was one we idealize, long for, and too often consider a relic of the past. At the opening and closing of each show, the camera panned a model of such an idealized neighborhood, with neat homes on small lots, tree-lined streets, small stores, and pedestrians making their way around a scaled utopia.
During the show, a streetcar took viewers into a neighborhood of make-believe. This kind of environment, this perfect place to live that many of us have in our minds, is for most of us just make-believe.
I thought it might be a good time to reflect on neighborhoods and what purpose they serve. To do this, we must ask several fundamental questions. First, we should ask "what is our neighborhood?" Along those lines we can query descriptively and ask "What should our neighborhood be like?" and "What kinds of neighborhoods help to make good neighbors?"
There are several meanings for the word "neighborhood," some dealing with people and some with place. Among the definitions are: A district or area with distinctive characteristics, and the people who live near one another or in a particular district or area.
For many of us, the neighborhood in our minds is the general area where we grew up and the people there, or the place where our house is now. Then there are the connotations the word brings with it--friendly, close-knit, comfortable--that deal with both people and place.
Many neighborhoods in 21st Century America are not like the idealized ones in our head. It would be a stretch for many of us to describe the geographic areas in where we live as "friendly" or "distinct."
It is unlikely many of our neighborhoods contain the people Mister Rogers interacted with on his show, nor do they present an opportunity to meet neighbors. A post man, store owners, cooks: how many people do we even know from our own neighborhood?
Our neighborhoods, at least the suburban ones, are more often than not places we rarely ever go into. We put the car in the garage and close the door--and then exit the same way hours later. There is no "neighborhood" surrounding the house because there are no places or opportunities for people to interact or even meet.
These interactions that suburban "neighborhoods" make difficult or impossible are crucial to having a neighborhood that deals with both the personal and the physical aspects of a neighborhood. Mister Rogers understood the importance of these interactions.
Fred Rogers said, "If only you could sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to people you may never even dream of." That importance is both to other people individually, and to them collectively, as they make up a neighborhood.
Sociologists have observed that an important ingredient for class mobility was being removed when the physical space between class increased with the onset of suburbanization. These meetings Mister Rogers found so important were not so common in a suburban subdivision as on a city street. People at different socioeconomic levels can not learn from each other if they do not interact, and they do not interact if they are physically separated.
Losing that connection, it became easier to remove ourselves from social responsibilities, something else Fred Rogers emphasized in 1994, when he explained that "We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It's easy to say 'It's not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.'"
Jane Jacobs observed, in her landmark 1961 book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," that city streets bring together people who do not know each other in an intimate, private social fashion.
Jacobs said "There should be an almost unconscious assumption of general street support when the chips are down--when a citizen has to choose whether he will take responsibility, or abdicate it, in combatting barbarism or protecting strangers."
Her neighborhood, where people helped each other and took responsibility, sounds a lot like Mister Rogers neighborhood, "where all children feel secure and loved."
"The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many sidewalk contacts," Jacobs explained. "It grows out of people stopping by the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer or giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop, eyeing the girls while waiting to be called to dinner, admonishing the children, hearing about a job from the hardware man and borrowing a dollar from the druggist, admiring new babies, and sympathizing over the way a coat faded."
"Most of it is ostensibly utterly trivial but the sum of it is not trivial at all," Jacobs wrote sounding on the same wave length as Rogers when he said, "In the external scheme of things, this evening is as brief as the twinkling of an eye, yet such twinklings is what eternity is made of."
It is not that we don't want neighborhoods like the one portrayed by Mister Rogers or the ones Jacobs was telling city planners that we must keep. We do want them. Or at least we say we do and then go on to buy an isolated house in a distant suburb. Tony Nelessen, an architect and professor at Rutgers University, has showed residents around the U.S. slides showing different types of development, asking them to rank each on a scale from negative ten to positive ten.
Places we associate with suburbia--shopping malls, corporate office park buildings, and strip developments--produced average scores that were negative, while traditional town scenes, pedestrian courtyards, and downtown malls got positive scores. Mister Rogers' neighborhood wins. Still, many vote for suburban-style development with their pocketbooks. Nellessen seems to conclude this is at least in part because we are not building traditional neighborhoods in the vein of Mister Rogers' street, and "consumers" wishing to become "neighbors" are not often given a choice, s zoning codes often mandate suburban-style development.
In suburbia, it is hard to be neighbor. Often we have never met the few people around us. We can't walk to a grocery store because there is none. Neighbors don't sit on porches because there are none. Neighbors don't walk by because there are no sidewalks. We don't go out at night because there are no street lights. We don't wait for a streetcar because there are no streetcars.
But when houses are built close to the street, when lots are smaller and everything is close together and there are stores to walk to, when there are parks and other places for people to socialize, being a neighbor happens naturally. A good neighborhood happens with a little effort. Being a good neighbor is then something we learn to want to do--Mister Rogers taught us to want to be good neighbors. We do want to be good neighbors and we are looking for neighborhoods that make being a good neighbor easier. Because the truth is that good neighborhoods help us to be good neighbors.
Drawing by Kevin Yamada
Eric Miller is co-editor of The New Colonist.
