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City or Suburb?

City or Suburb?

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An article in yesterday’s Washington Post headlined “Is a city still a city if it’s in the suburbs?” discusses Reston Town Center, the Village at Leesburg and other “downtowns” that mimic the real thing.

The idea is to export urban density and excitement to the outlying ‘burbs. “[People] want to be in an environment, in a context, where they can experience life as fully as possible. They like to be around people, and they like to be around interesting things, and they like to be around energy. And that’s what the suburbs have historically lacked,” said Robert Kettler, who planned and developed the Village at Leesburg based on the model of Reston Town Center.

I have a complicated relationship with Reston Town Center, our closest “downtown.” When it was first built, I disparaged it for its fakery. It was a movie set of a city. Walk through the set doors and you would be in a mall. But as the years have passed; as restaurants, stores and plazas have been added; as festivals, concerts and wine tastings have lured me to its center, I have developed a reluctant fondness for the place.

As the article points out, many city neighborhoods now admired for their hip urbanity —think Capitol Hill and Georgetown — were once planned. And besides, how can I fault developers for paying attention to how people live, to adding town squares and storefront windows, to isolating and replicating the ingredients of urban charm?

Kettler has heard all the criticisms of these faux downtowns, the Post article says. “But he sees a naturally evolving plot: Driving through the Village at Leesburg, he is happy to see that the young trees he planted a few years ago are a little taller, that there are more people hitting treadmills at L.A. Fitness, that there are more people on the street. ‘When you put the camera on and you put the actors on the stage, it looks like a real place.'”

The article doesn’t answer the question, “Is a city still a city if it’s in the suburbs,” but it does plead for more time. Cities are a work in progress. It may just be that we’re pioneering something new here a few miles from my house. That what began as an experiment of urban density in the suburbs is giving us something we all want and need.

It may be. But when we decide whether and when to leave our suburban home, one thing is for sure: Reston Town Center will not make us stay. 

The original Reston downtown: Lake Anne.

Moderation in Motion

Moderation in Motion

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I begin the morning on foot. Down the suburban street, across a tiny wooden bridge over a culvert and through a parting in the trees. It’s where we walked last night, a short and winding path that leads to the wider rail-to-trail that runs between Baltimore and Annapolis. The spiders have been busy overnight and I brush the sticky webs off my arms.

Once on the main trail I hit my stride. I haven’t walked to work since I lived in New York more than two decades ago. And I’m not really walking to work now. Only making my way to the commuter bus. But there is no car involved, and that means I start the day in a calm and ancient way. With movement and foot fall and time for thinking as I stroll.

The downed trees I see make me think of our recent storm, our erratic weather, of global warming and what we’re losing with it, which is moderation. I ponder moderation for a minute, the peace it brings and the difficulty of achieving it these days. Walking is itself a moderating activity, isn’t it? It’s not the stop and go of vehicular locomotion but something that — because it’s limited by blood and bone and muscle — keeps us true to ourselves. Walking, then, is moderation in motion. It’s the temperate response to these extreme times.

What I used to see when I started the day on foot: the East Side glimpsed from the reservoir path.

Find a Place

Find a Place

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… I watch them, the creatures of a city I have dreamed, the flowering
of an ache to be at home …

These lines are from a poem called “The Flowering” by Glenn Shea, from a collection called Find a Place That Could Pass for Home, featured on today’s “Writer’s Almanac.”  The poem caught my eye because it’s about home and about London, where I’ve always felt at home.

I think of a city I have dreamed, and I see the canyons of Lower Manhattan, the hidden mews of the Village, the broad swath of Amsterdam heading north, the green lawns of Central Park, front yard of a nation.

I remember the grass there, its outcroppings of rock, the aroma of a summer subway, clanging of metal against metal, a fresh breeze from the river flowing across our roof. The haze of a summer Sunday, heading back to my little apartment, knowing I could never live in the city forever, that this place I loved would never be my home.

Unfamiliar Route

Unfamiliar Route

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Sometimes I take the long way to the office. I go straight after leaving Metro instead of turning left. I walk alongside one of the largest homeless shelters in the city and past a wall of cars exiting a tunnel. There’s a building under renovation, and I have to scamper across the street to avoid the construction.

This route takes a little longer. I can’t do it on auto-pilot. But there is a bustle and an energy to it that isn’t present on my regular path.

Does the allure of this walk come from its unfamiliarity? Or is it the nature of the scenery itself — closer to the train station than the sunken highway — that’s responsible? I’m not sure. But it’s worth the extra steps to ponder the answer.

Eye Candy

Eye Candy

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I chose the walk because of what I would see. Not the usual scenery. So I turned left on Third Street, cut across through the courts complex, past the Canadian Embassy and on to a series of plazas. It was the flip side of the Mall, the downtown side of the National Archives, heading toward the White House but never actually there.

There were fountains and chairs and people. Many had just picked up their lunch. They carried fast food bags or pizza boxes or salad containers. (Is there a hierarchy here, I wondered.)

Rain was in the forecast, and people scurried as if at any moment they would have to run. All around me was bustle and commerce and, most of all, new sights to see. I moved through it all quickly, wanting to look and not to think.

It was eye candy, I told myself.  When the landscape grows predictable, vary the route.

I Didn’t Take Pictures When I Lived There

I Didn’t Take Pictures When I Lived There

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But I make up for it when I return. It’s the years in the wilderness, the suburban wilderness. They have softened me, I suppose, turned me into a tourist. I snap and snap and don’t care if people think I’m a tourist. I’m easily impressed. I look up.

Every direction is a photograph. The ripple of water in a lagoon, the play of light on a brownstone, the San Remo glimpsed through a screen of bright willow green.

Maybe we should move back to New York, I say to Tom, knowing, before the words leave my mouth, how foolish they sound, the four-bedroom colonial back in Virginia filled to bursting. Knowing that life has taken me far from the person I was when I made my way in Manhattan years ago.

But that’s the point of travel. Possibilities present themselves. Life, in all its fullness, returns.

Walking in the City

Walking in the City

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A walker in the suburbs strolls the streets or ambles through the woods, but her destination is secondary. She walks for the walking and not for where it takes her.

Compare this to a walker in the city, pounding the concrete day after day. Here is walking with purpose, commuting on foot or by subway (which must also be walked to and from); walking to the corner for a newspaper, to the market for a quart of milk. Walking because it’s faster than taking a cab. Walking because, well, it’s just the way you get around. It is the air you breathe; it is the environment.

All this is to say, a walker in the suburbs forgets how much she walked when she lived in the big city. And when she goes back there her feet remind her. Her soul too. It soars.

Uptown View: An Elegy

Uptown View: An Elegy

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Yesterday I learned that a friend I’d corresponded with for years, the editor who hired me at McCall’s Magazine, passed away in May. I hadn’t seen her in years, but I was always fond of her. She was the second person gone on my Christmas card list this year (the other my old boyfriend Gerry, who I eulogized seven months ago in this blog) and I was so sad to learn of her death. Sad for her family above all, but sad also for the passing of an era that she represents.

Lisel was first an agent and then an editor. She was smart and funny and wore her hair in a simple page boy style. She was the one who called me after I dropped off my resume and clips a few days after finishing up a graduate program in journalism. “Well, you’re sort of old to be an intern,” she said, with an endearing New Yorkish bluntness I was just beginning to understand. “But we’d like to have you for the summer.”

The summer turned into five years, and I went from editorial assistant to articles editor. Lisel became executive editor. She was always the calm heart of the magazine, which (like all the “Seven Sister” publications at that time) was edited by a man. I can still recall her big-looped script and her slightly distracted air. She was an intellectual, as many women’s magazine editors were then, and though we had our share of “Lady Di” covers, inside McCall‘s you could still find splendid fiction, elegant essays and controversial reports.

The magazine offices were housed at 230 Park Avenue, the ornate building which straddles that great thoroughfare. The elevators had painted clouds on their ceiling; they made me feel like I was in heaven. And in so many ways, I was. I’ve thought a lot about that place and those people since hearing the news of Lisel, about the long hall where she and other top editors had their offices. They all had an uptown view of Park Avenue; the whole world was at their feet.

Vista

Vista

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What does the eye appreciate, the eye that evolved to spot antelope across a distant horizon, the eye that often looks no farther now than the tiny screen of a smart phone?

It likes the greensward, the open expanse of turf, like the swelling savannahs of our evolutionary past. And there, where earth meets sky, if not an animal of prey then an emblem of our ambition: a city to conquer and admire.

I once spent time in this place, the Sheep Meadow of Central Park. In fact, I once lost a set of keys somewhere on this vast lawn. I walked by the meadow daily and mediated on this vista. It is a uniquely American view, embracing our love of cities and of countryside, promising both peace and prosperity. It is a sigh of relief, a gasp of delight.

A Moving Post

A Moving Post

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Today I write from the New Jersey turnpike, a rider on the highway instead of a walker in the suburbs. That I can do such a thing amazes me. So I write with a grateful heart on a bouncy laptop.

Yesterday I visited Central Park, and when I started strolling uptown I felt both wired and slow; I wanted to move more quickly. I wanted to ride a bike. There’s quite a brisk bicycle-rental business now at the 59th Street entrance and soon I was pedaling around the big park loop: zooming past the boat basin and the Met on the east side, up a small hill to Harlem at the north end, then past a noisy blue swimming pool.

I dismounted at the reservoir, which was my running track when I lived on the Upper West Side many years ago. There were the familiar curves in the path, the lapping water, the St. Remo Towers looming above it all. Coming back on the bridle path under an ornate metal bridge, I thought about the many times I’d walked around that large pond, how much my life had changed since then, but how the pond was still there, more or less the same.

It was early afternoon on a fine hot summer day, and I was back in Manhattan. Right then, that was enough for me.