Who Do You Live With?

We were trying to explain the Census to our 7-year-old son. They want to make sure they count everybody, we said, so they send a questionnaire to every home. We have to fill it out and send it back.

"So they want to know everyone in our family?" he asked. We said yes. "Cheddar too?" Cheddar is our dog. No, the Census does not ask about pets... but shouldn't it?

Just the day before, I had gone to see a new doctor. They sent me an online form to complete in advance, and they wanted to know if I lived with any pets. On an individual level, there was a clear medical interest in pets. The data would also be invaluable on the larger scale of the Census.

The Rain Garden That Wouldn't Grow

Recently, my wife and I were out on a date and taking a stroll through Harlem before dinner when we stumbled on a dog relief area at the corner of Manhattan Avenue and East 122nd Street. I was excited and my wife was, well, glad to see me enjoying myself.

A few years ago while musing about planning for pets, I came across the French canisites. Now I had stumbled on one in my own town, and I hadn't even heard about it!

It is a wonderful little example of the transformation of a residual space. Initially it was a hatched area in the roadway where northbound traffic is diverted as Manhattan Avenue becomes a southbound one-way street. It was just the sort of dead space that was long common on our paved streets. In 2012, it was converted into a rain garden to improve storm water management and probably contribute a few count toward the Million Trees program, but the plants just wouldn't grow on the street side of the triangle. After a few years of the vegetation struggling and consistently dying off, it appears somebody had the genius to stop fighting the inevitable and repurpose the space to address the dog poop problem that is chronic on sidewalks throughout New York City.

Early Morning Haunts

The early hours are haunted times. Sometimes it seems still, but in that eerie silence something is always quietly moving about. At other times, activities go on regularly in the dark without us, as we slumber in our beds unaware of the activities occupying our regular places. Familiar places become foreign to us during these irregular hours, with a heightened sense of awareness.  At these times, I am often haunted by Jean Anouilh's Antigone returning home and describing the early morning:

De me promener, nourrice. C'était beau. Tout était gris. Maintenant, tu ne peux pas savoir, tout est déjà rose, jaune, vert. C'est devenu une carte postale. Il faut te lever plus tôt, nourrice, si tu veux voir un monde sans couleurs... 

Le jardin dormait encore. Je l'ai surpris, nourrice. Je l'ai vu sans qu'il s'en doute. C'est beau un jardin qui ne pense pas encore aux hommes... 

Dans les champs c'était tout mouillé et cela attendait. Tout attendait. Je faisais un bruit énorme toute seule sur la route et j'étais gênée parce que je savais bien que ce n'était pas moi qu'on attendais. 

From walking about, nurse. It was beautiful. Everything was gray. Now, you can't tell, everything is already pink, yellow, green. It's turned into a post card. You must get up earlier, nurse, if you want to see a world without colors... 

The garden was still sleeping. I crept up on it, nurse. I saw it without it suspecting. A garden that isn't thinking about men yet is beautiful... 

In the fields it was all wet and it was waiting. Everything was waiting. I made a huge noise all alone on the road and I was bothered because I knew that it wasn't me it was waiting for. 

Truth be told, my memory probably embellishes on Anouilh a bit. My imagination makes it more mythic, perhaps, than the actual text itself. Perhaps that is part of how haunting works.

Recently I found myself in Weehawken at the corner of 19th Street and Boulevard East at four in the morning, where I was again visited by this familiar memory. I experienced the sense of being bothered by the world's indifference to us, and this time it wasn't waiting for anything, although I rather expected it to be.

The Road to a Park System for the Future

I drove with my family to Wisconsin and back for Christmas, with a minor detour through Chicago each way. Four days on the road gives you plenty of time to mull things over, and as I passed through the transitions between urban areas and open countryside, kicked in and out of cruise control interacting with the mixture of cars and trucks on the highway, and detoured through Chicago, I found myself thinking a lot about how park systems may look in the future. This may take some explanation, but please come along with me for this ride.

Driving in and out of urban areas is generally just drab. More often than not, buildings become more mundane and spread out, commercial signage grows larger and taller, and then eventually just seems to give up. Most people usually just call it "urban sprawl," even if it's a term without a real definition. But there are a few cities that have great gateways. New York did, once upon a time. Passengers arrived in the harbor by ship, passing alongside the welcoming Statue of Liberty as the skyline took shape as individual skyscrapers continuing to push impossibly higher as you drew nearer. Dramatic as it is to pass through the cut in the Palisades and emerge onto the George Washington Bridge, the city is a mere glimmer in the distance before disappearing into a bewildering tangle of ramps. Likewise, the helix of the Lincoln Tunnel provides impressive glances at the Midtown skyline, but then grinds through a toll plaza and squeezes through the tube before emptying onto congested, nondescript Manhattan intersections.

But Chicago has its moments. We drove along Garfield Boulevard on a side trip going both ways on this trip. Among my strongest memories in life is peering out the window as my cab drove from Midway Airport along the tree lined boulevard on my first trip to Chicago, when I moved to Hyde Park sight unseen to begin college. Exiting the Mad Max world of the Dan Ryan onto Garfield Boulevard invokes a somewhat similar sense of calm and wonder, a definite moment of arrival. Yet while the broad green space and regular spacing of mature trees is still great drama, each time I visit the boulevards on the South Side, the more acutely I feel they have been stripped down to mere scenery. In practice, the boulevards seem to do little to connect any activities between the parks. There is no flowing use of a system of parks, and the roadway design seems to cut off much opportunity. Yet even without the reality of real connective use, the mere vision is compelling and the spacing of greenery contributes to a more legible and enjoyable neighborhood structure. There is much still to be learned and built on from this old Olmsted pattern as our streets continue to evolve.

Should urban planners care about dogs?

Fundamental to urban life is the ability for many people to live together in close proximity. Minimizing the nuisances that residents cause their neighbors is one of the most constant sources of friction and frustration. How dogs fit into this delicate balance is an interesting question. My contention is that despite a few challenges, dogs help draw together communities. We need to start considering the living conditions and infrastructure for dogs more fully and deliberately in urban planning.

First, we might consider how dogs could be nuisances to neighbors. After all, this has largely been the primary focus of governmental actions regarding pets for decades. So, how can the presence of dogs cause problems?

• Biting
• Spreading disease
• Barking or whining
• Pooping on the sidewalk
• Killing plants with excessive amounts of urine

Losing Control in the Suburbs

We seek to make the world around us an interactive place that anticipates our needs and responds to our desires.  For millennia, we have domesticated animals, transforming the wild beasts of our collective nightmares into loving pets that follow our commands.  For more than a century, we have illuminated our streets to alleviate our fears of what lurks in the darkness.  We have created doors that open before us, and we continue to refine computers to ask us what we want.

The terrifying wolf that ate Grandma
(engraving by Gustave Doré)

Dogs domesticated from wolves have become
part of our home

Until we consider this innate drive to create a dynamic environment that responds to our needs and desires, we cannot understand the rise of the suburbs and their current crisis. The suburbs offered this promise, and their failing ability to deliver now dulls their luster.

Consider what the suburban dream offered: a yard, modern appliances, accommodations for cars, and more convenient shopping. For decades, these worked together to provide suburban residents a comfortable control over the environments where they lived.  Yet over the past several decades, transformations in the social and economic landscape, together with new technologies, have made the suburban model too rigid and unresponsive to our desires.

The yard is an extension of the home.  It was envisioned as a small parkland or garden that could be configured based on personal preferences.  It served as a playground where children were more closely supervised and protected from strangers.  The family dog became ubiquitous with the backyard.  Today, the relationships are changing.  Longer commutes and the increase in work hours have made yard work more difficult to fit into the schedule; what was once an enjoyable leisure activity has often become an obligation that interferes with other preferences for limited free time. It has become less of a weekend retreat and more a weekly chore.  In some cases, it becomes an additional expense, as busy families contract out their yard work.  An increase in organized activities seems to have reduced the yard's role as a playground for the family children and their friends.  And while the family dog still enjoys free reign of the backyard, as what continues to provide one of the most compelling reasons for families to move to the suburbs, urban areas have become somewhat more supportive with improved dog parks, reducing somewhat this relative advantage of the suburbs.