Where People Like to Live

When I was a little boy I loved Sesame Street. Not because of the puppets or the stories. I was fascinated by the idea that everyone knew everyone else, that people usually walked everywhere they went, and that Mr. Hooper's store was right there in the middle of it all. When I was 9 or 10 my parents and I drove to San Francisco to visit some friends. I was amazed by the old victorian with oddly shaped rooms and bay windows. When I was 11 I had a school field trip to the Financial District of San Francisco. I knew right then that this was where I wanted to live. When I was 17 and visited NYC on an 18 hour pass from Fort Monmouth I was even more blown away. People playing three card monte and selling "meat on a stick" were every where. here was an old woman telling stories, and people were gathered around her listening. I ate spring rolls and jellyfish at an illegal Vietnamese restaurant in a basement of an apartment building in an alley in Chinatown, I saw the ships in the harbor and rode the subway. I walked up Broadway from Battery Park to Union Square and drank it all in with my eyes. I was in love with cities. When I was older still, I visited New York again, but on business and was even more impressed with the speed at which things happened. I did online gambling deals with hyper connected Ultra-Orthodox Jews, and Online education deals with cutting edge ad agencies. And later I visited Boston on business but took three hours off to read Plato in the main reading room in the library on Copely Square. It was civilization at it's finest.

It has long been my contention that most people want to live in cities or on farms. In the last half of the 20th Century it seemed like suburbs, which were intended to have the best of both, but really didn't, were proving me wrong. But this article in the Atlantic which uses real estate prices as evidence, provides my vindication.

It was 30 years before I was able to live in a City with sky scrapers and wide sidwalks full of people; where I knew my neighbors and my grocer and my dry cleaner and could walk to fifteen restaurants, two bookstores a laundrymat, a shoe repair store, a high school, two parks, a subway station, a printer, an opthamologist, two furniture stores, an art gallery, three churches, a grocery store, and much much more within three blocks of where I lived. It only lasted a brief time, not even two years.

I know that when the Lord returns I will live in a real city again, in fact, it is the prototype, the telos, the eschaton, the fulfillment of all cities made by human hands. But until then, it sure would be nice to live in one made by human hands again.