I live in the country now and the public space in our neighborhood amounts to the road in front of our house. It is hardly a freeway. The intervals between cars can stretch to significant lengths at times. But, having lawn and meadow, we never use the road for anything but transportation.
When I was a kid, though, growing up in Washington, D.C., the streets of our neighborhood were places for tag football, lightpost to lightpost. Public space was just that.
It occurred to me recently that over the last several years I have spent a good amount of time in nearby Rutland. I have driven down pretty much all of its streets at one point or another, at all times of day and in all sorts of weather and I have never once interrupted a game in the street. My minivan has never once been the occasion of the sentinel's bellowed "Car!!!" and the scatter of sweaty children.
I have, however, had to slow my car down for the sake of dissolute youth shuffling three abreast in their vaguely menacing hoodied packs. But I wouldn't say that that's a public use of the public space.
I'm not sure why behaving humanly feels so counter cultural, but there would definitely be something rebellious, something provocative about using a sidewalk in Rutland to do something other than walk along the side.
Well, here's to having picnics in public spaces, to stopping traffic, to doing the subversive work of living publicly.
As a long time observer of the Rutland/Vermont Scene this is a brilliant observation, and true, and well put. Maybe it's a cultural thing. The streets of the suburbs we knew as children were peopled by a decidedly different sort than those who inhabit Rutland. Or maybe it's generational? Huh...Come to think of it, kids don't play in the streets here in Idyllwild either, but I have known it to happen up in the L.A. area.
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