Why Dogs are Good for the Neighborhood

Leonard, the dog we adopted from Atlanta Lab Rescue last summer, is doing better.  Tom says he's now "doggier" than he used to be, and I think that's right.  Even though he still doesn't ask to go into the backyard regularly, he does occasionally, and we can now get him to go outside with the promise of a treat (he's not big on dog biscuits, but he'll do anything for Pupperoni).  So we end up walking him at least twice a day and sometimes more frequently. 

Although I still have one child living at home, somehow it works out that I end up doing the preponderance of the dog walking, at least when I am home.  Tom certainly helps out -- often walking him while I'm at work or sometimes while I'm making dinner -- but when I'm around I do most of it.  And being out on the street with the dog once or twice a day, I've seen the changes day by day in the new house that's being built and the one that's being renovated, and the lack of anything at all happening at the corner, when the apartments used to be.  I've seen babysitters arrive early in the morning and leave at the end of the workday, and I've met neighbors I'd never met before, even though I've lived here a really long time.  And there are other neighbors -- almost all neighbors with dogs -- that I now see regularly enough that I know them better than I did.  If you see the same people enough times, you know them well enough to talk to them, and if you know them well enough to talk to them you might get to know them better.

Caroline gave me a copy of  "Life Between Buildings:  Using Public Space" for Christmas.  In about two hundred pages of text and photographs, Danish architect Jan Gehl picks up where Jane Jacobs left off to identify specific features of the built environment that create places where people want to be.  There are things we have to do -- go to work, go to the grocery store, go home -- that we will do whether they are fun or not.  But if there is something interesting along the way-- if on the way home, you walk by a neighborhood bar or coffee shop and spot friends -- you might linger or take a detour,  Then there are things that you do just for fun, that you don't have to do at all.  And if we are making a choice, we prefer lively streets to dead ones, a shopping district with interesting, unpredictable things to see and lots of people and musicians on the street corners rather than a mall, and places that are pleasant to be rather than, say, walking along Buford Highway.  A common denominator here is there being other people around who might be doing something interesting, or with whom we might strike up a conversation, or we might already know and could catch up on what they've been doing since the last time we saw them.  This is what the book is about,  It sounds obvious, but it's not, or at least it wasn't to me.

"Low-intensity contact is also a situation from which other forms of contact can grow," according to Gehl.  

"Contacts that develop spontaneously in connection with merely being where there are others are usually very fleeting -- a short exchange of words, a brief discussion with the next man on the bench, chatting with a child in a bus, watching someone working and asking a few questions,and so forth.  From this simple level, contacts can grow to other levels, as the participants wish.  Meeting, being present in the same space, is in each of these circumstances the prime prerequisite."

If "being in the same space" is the prerequisite, getting out of your house and not being sealed up in your car is really important.  He continues,

"The possibility of meeting neighbors and co-workers often in connection with daily comings and goings implies a valuable opportunity to establish and later maintain acquaintances in a relaxed and undemanding way....Frequent meetings in connection with daily activities increase chances of developing contacts with neighbors, a fact noted in many surveys.  With frequent meetings friendships and the contact network are maintained in a far simpler and less demanding way than if friendship must be kept up by telephone and invitation.  If this is the case, it is often rather difficult to maintain contact, because more is always demanded of the participants when meetings must be arranged in advance."

Every once in a while, someone goes crazy on one of the neighborhood message boards or email lists about dog waste left in their yards, or in plastic bags in their trash cans.  (Trash cans?  Really?)  (My favorite recent one included a long post about what a health hazard dog poop was, full of coliform bateria and other microbial agents, followed by a response to the effect of "I can see why people don't pick it up after their dog - they are afraid.")  Dogs are good for the neighborhood because neighborhoods with people who walk their dogs are going to have closer social connections with their neighbors.

I have to stop writing now. I have to go walk my dog.

Everyday Life in Color, 1956

A couple of weekends ago, the girls were both still home for winter break from college; Tom wanted to go on a hike, but the weather forecast wasn't promising.  So we (and apparently everyone else with relatives in town and the day off from work) went to the High Museum instead.  Before we left we had taken a quick look on line at the current exhibits.  There was "Cézanne and the Modern," including a van Gogh painting, that was closing the next weekend.  We walked through that while a choir sang in the adjacent Florence Cathedral exhibit.  

Sarah wanted to see and hear Janet Cardiff's Forty Part Motet, a sound installation in the contemporary art galleries.  Cardiff recorded 59 individual singers as they performed composer Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui(1556), which (according to the High Museum's description of the exhibit) translates to "In No Other is My Hope."  Walking around the large circle of audio speakers, it was like you were walking through the choir.  You could hear the individual voices.  Most of the visitors to the gallery fell silent and listened, transported to a 16th century cathedral by sound.  It was wonderful.

What else was there to see?  We asked a guard where "the photography exhibit" was, meaning one that I no longer remember the name of, and getting instead directions to the exhibit of photographs that Gordon Parks took for Life Magazine in the 1950s of everyday life in the segregation era south.  We did find the small exhibit I had asked about, and that was interesting, but then we continued to the Gordon Parks exhibit.  

Gordon Parks grew up in Fort Scott, Kansas, and attended a segregated elementary school.  He became a photographer and during the 1950s worked for Life Magazine. Later he became a film director; Shaft is his best-known film.  Much of his work for Life Magazine had not been exhibited before, but now several exhibits from Parks' archives have been assembled.  One, on what happened to his classmates from his segregated elementary school, includes photos that were never published.  They are now on exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in New York.

Most of the photos in the exhibit at the High Museum were taken in Alabama.  Some of the pictures were included in a photo essay that was published in Life in 1956, entitled "The Restraints:  Open and Hidden"; others in the exhibit weren't published before.  The exhibit focuses on the ordinary lives of ordinary people, including Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton, Sr., of Mobile, Alabama.

Writing about this exhibit for the New York Times, Maurice Berger wrote,

More than anything, the “Segregation Series” challenged the abiding myth of racism: that the races are innately unequal, a delusion that allows one group to declare its superiority over another by capriciously ascribing to it negative traits, abnormalities or pathologies. It is the very fullness, even ordinariness, of the lives of the Thornton family that most effectively contests these notions of difference, which had flourished in a popular culture that offered no more than an incomplete or distorted view of African-American life.

The photos speak for themselves.  A few examples.  This is Joanne Wilson, one of the Thorntons' daughters, with her niece, standing outside a movie theater in Mobile, Alabama.  Above this well-dressed young woman and small girl is a neon sign, "Colored Entrance."

In this untitled photo from Shady Grove, Alabama, a family orders at a window at a drive-in restaurant.  Between them and the wrap-around sign announcing shakes, sundaes, and cones is the sign designating the window as "Colored."

"Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama, 1956" showed children looking through the fence at a whites only playground.

These pictures were taken almost 60 years ago, and a lot of things have changed since then.  The pictures are jarring to see now.  We still have plenty of issues around race and inequality in the United States, but we don't have the kind of segregation any more that we had when these pictures were taken.  I also wondered, seeing these photos, what became of the people in them?  What about the children looking through the fence at the playground?  They are not much older than I am.  Where are they now?  

We do know something about what happened to some of the people Gordon Parks photographed.  Some of them paid a price for their participation in the photo essay.  The Thorntons' daughter Allie Lee Causey was quoted advocating integration.  She lost her teaching job soon after the piece was published and, fearing for their safety, she and her husband left Alabama.  Her sister Joanne Wilson, the woman standing outside the movie theater with her niece, was interviewed by Maurice Berger for the Times in 2013.  She married in 1956 and she and her husband had two children.  After she graduated from college, she became a school teacher and taught American history and economics at a high school in Prichard, Alabama. According to that article, "Like her father, Albert Thornton Sr., she believed in the power of education to uplift African-Americans and prepare them to overcome racism and segregation. Each year, she organized a bake sale to finance a trip to Atlanta for her female students and introduce them to the city’s historically black colleges."

And there's another link to Atlanta.  The exhibit includes a photo taken at the Atlanta airport in 1956.  In this photo, an African-American woman in a starched white uniform holds a white child, while a well-dressed white woman sits nearby.  Since we visited the exhibit, the Times' Lens blog on photography had a feature on this photo, soliciting information about the people in the photograph.   Assuming the two women were from Atlanta, there may still be someone in the city who knows them; they might even still be alive.  According to James Estrin's post,

"In the notes he sent with the film to the Life magazine lab, Mr. Parks wrote about Roll 24: 'These shots were all taken candidly in the Airlines Terminal in Atlanta.' This image, he said, 'shows the continuous matter of servitude which extends into the terminal around 2 a.m. Here, a white baby is held by a Negro maid while the baby’s mother checks on reservations, etc. Although the Negro woman serves as nurse-maid for the white woman’s baby, the two would not be allowed to sit and eat a meal together in any Atlanta restaurant.'"

The last time I saw at the High Museum that moved me and made me think as much as this one did was back in 2008, when Tom and I saw "Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1957-1968."   According to what I've read, Gordon Parks saw empathy as an important tool in ending the injustice of segregation; he hoped that photographs that demonstrated the essential, shared humanity of people who were relegated by law and custom to second class citizenship could lead to social change and justice.   "Gordon Parks:  Segregation Story" will be at the High Museum until June 7.  Don't miss your chance to see it.

The Great Good Place

Caramba Cafe is closed again.  We got the news via Facebook on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, I can't remember which.  We went there last Friday night and again on Tuesday.  We tried to make it there early both evenings because we expected them to be busy.  On Friday night, when I took the picture above, they weren't so busy yet, but on Tuesday night we got the last table that was available; there were several multifamily groups there already and they kept coming - all of us wanting one last dinner at Caramba.

Caramba Cafe used to be in Morningside, where Timone's now is, and we used to walk there.  They closed in 2010, and when they reopened on Decatur Street, some of the Morningside regular customers became regulars there.  There were people we saw there almost every time we went.  We saw our neighbor Marian there frequently, and Caroline's reading teacher from early elementary school and his wife seemed to be there all the time.  I've taken out of town colleagues there for dinner and margaritas, and we've had dinner there before being dropped off at Irwin Street for the last two lantern parades on the Beltline (this one and this one).  We continued to celebrate birthdays and report cards and the girls coming home from college there.  I celebrated the last couple of my birthdays with shots of tequila with Mia.  We took our German exchange student there several times during the six weeks or so that he was at our house; he discovered that he really liked fajitas.  There were kids there Iain's age who he'd gone to elementary school with, and the two of them would wander off to talk to other high school kids who were there.  Sometimes we sat at the bar and talked to people we didn't know, but more often we were at a table by the window.  We watched one of the protest marches following Michael Brown's death from that window; the kids took off to watch, and I stayed long enough to pay the bill.  There almost always were hugs before we left from George and Rachel and Mia.

A couple of years ago I started reading a book that I never finished, The Great Good Place, by Ray Oldenburg.  (This was one of those books that would have been a great article in The New Yorker or The Atlantic, but there wasn't quite enough for a whole book).  The idea is that the public places that you and your neighbors go to regularly, whether it's a neighborhood tavern or a diner or a coffee shop or a barber shop, are important to neighborhoods and communities.  They are places you can go where they know you, and they facilitate strangers becoming acquaintances and acquaintances becoming friends.  It's a safe environment for sociability in a society where many people live alone or are far away from family and may not know their neighbors.

Back when I was reading this book, the example from my own experience that kept coming to mind was Caramba Cafe.  This was our family's great good place, and we are going to miss it very much.  If there's a great good place in your life, go there often and take your friends.  Appreciate it with your presence and your patronage.  

The last night we went to Caramba - the next to the last night they were open - I went through the piles of books next to my bed, looking for this one.  I was going to give it to Mia, but couldn't find it. 

Best of luck to la familia Caramba, and to all of us who felt at home there.