Economy of the Miniature?

Five Weeks’ “Growth”

Dear Reader:

Okay, so I moseyed on down the road a few miles with my good friend, Sandi, to check out a MOFGA (Maine Organic Farmer’s and Grower’s Association) certified farm stand. Piper’s Knoll Farm in Newfield, Maine exemplifies what I consider an ideal local business. Yes, they are certified organic, but according to their website, farmers Karl and Cynthia Froelich use farming methods that go BEYOND organic…including permaculture and biodynamic techniques, managing natural woodland and wetlands for native species of medicinal plants, and using season-extending methods such as hoop houses for greater productivity (they’ve had carrots already, started in the hoop houses in February! Amazing!).

Karl is a stonework landscaper. Cynthia is a Master Gardener and herbalist, and she also conducts workshops on eco-spiritual topics. In addition to their farm-stand, the Froelich’s participate in the farmer’s market in Saco, Maine. They are diversified…just like their farm.

This week I’ve been reading a new book on sustainable life called SMALL, GRITTY, AND GREEN by Catherine Tumbler. A journalist and historian, Tumbler spent a few years researching and touring small cities, specifically “Rust Belt” cities–the old industrial cities left crumbling and emptying in the wake of suburban development, highway-bisection of neighborhoods and downtowns, and the de-industrialization of the American economy as trade agreements launched the flight of production to cheap labor overseas. Tumbler agrees with people like James Howard Kunstler (author of the New Urbanist book, THE GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHWHERE) who believe that in a post-oil world, our small cities–not our small towns or metropolises–are best suited for a new way of life, one that is sustainable, human-scale, and doable in a low-carbon future.

These cities–in Maine, I think of places like Biddeford/Saco, Sanford, Waterville where the textile mills once ran three shifts a day–still have infrastructure intact that could be used when we inevitably must begin producing things here in the U.S. of A again. These small cities are surrounded by smaller rings of suburban and exurban development than the big metropolises–meaning the farmlands are closer to the urban center. Taking a look at the numbers, Tumbler makes the case for small-scale farming over commodity farming, retrofitting empty retail “malls” and concrete big box structures into sustainability centers–even hydroponic farms and raised-bed crop-raising on top of the parking lots, and the breakdown of highways instead of the constant necessity of maintaining them.

So, imagine a small city with parks and mixed-use architecture and Broadways and downtowns. Imagine a bus system, walkable neighborhoods, sidewalks, and fewer cars. Imagine suburbs with community gardens and backyard chickens. And then imagine a ring of fertile farmland cultivated by thoughtful, intelligent people like the Froelichs who provide food and medicine for the people in the city and suburb. Imagine a city without a Walmart but instead a bunch of locally-owned shops–a Plummer’s Hardware, a Betty’s Dress Shop, a bakery, a butcher shop, a bookstore–not just downtown but in many neighborhoods. Imagine a downtown district with a department store, a theater, a park, upscale shops, a music hall, City Hall, art galleries, restaurants…and lots of interesting people to watch when you sit down for a latte at the cafe.

Early Girls

Okay, so I am drifting into a utopian fantasy. Or else I’m reminiscing about a time in America just before I was born, before the rise of the cookie-cutter suburb, the two-car family, the two-income household, NAFTA, GATT, off-shoring, and the shrinking of the middle class.

What about today? What am I doing living in a single-use exurban housing development that is really like living at camp year-round? How can I work toward that other, larger vision? I garden, and I tell myself I am keeping some knowledge alive. Honestly, though? The economy of my miniature garden box garden is really pitiful!

I spent about $100 on “ingredients” for my straw-bale tomato experiment. The bales were pricey, considering. Then I had to add in the nitrogen fertilizer–not exactly organic farming practice there, folks. I bought three heirloom tomato plants, and if all goes well I may actually be able to save some seeds for next year. The other three (Early Girl) are not heirloom, and I have no idea if the seeds are viable or not. If these six plants produce thirty or so pounds of tomatoes all together, I suppose I may break even.

As for the other garden boxes, these are really nothing more than fun. I might as well have planted all ornamentals, since the small (miniature) scale of my garden-box garden will produce nothing more than a few servings of each kind of veggie, even if the plants produce well.

For instance, my peas are beautiful and blossoming, but really I may end up with a pound of snap peas at most. At Piper’s Knoll today, I bought a pound of snap peas for $3. The radishes have been fun, but I could have bought a bunch for $2.50. A large bag of greens was only $4. Sigh. My greens boxes have been the biggest disappointment of all: the spinach went to seed at two-inches tall, the arugula hasn’t even sprouted, the micro-greens did no better than the spinach. There is probably something wrong with the pH balance in the soil (all those pine needles?), though the romaine and green leaf lettuces are still growing if slowly, slowly…

The basil plants look great. The cucumbers are blossoming, and I’m hopeful for a good harvest. And if the zucchini and summer squash don’t end up with that gray mold stuff, I COULD have squashes coming out my ears in another month or so. Let’s hope! But in the end, this sort of gardening will never feed the family. Another $100 for ornamentals and cuke, fennel, basil, cabbage, sage, and pepper starts will, if I’m lucky, provide enough produce to pay for itself. If I’m lucky. Otherwise, I can put it down on the books as “entertainment” or maybe “education.”

Really, economically-speaking, I would be better off putting that $200 toward membership in a CSA farm like Piper’s Knoll. Maybe they’d let me come over and do some weeding now and again because…

I attempt to garden because I want to keep the rhythm of the growing season beating in my heart. I want my daughter to see me digging in the dirt and pulling a round, purple radish out of the ground, grown from a seed I planted. I want her to taste a cucumber right off the vine so she can appreciate the difference between it and the tasteless thing that rode on a truck from Mexico all the way to Maine and landed on a supermarket shelf.

Will I do this again next year? Yeah, I probably will. I’ll also buy as much produce and meat and eggs locally and in-state as I can…because those farmers are the people who will feed us in a low-carbon future. I encourage you to search out small-scale, diversified, biodynamic farms in your area and support them with your food dollars and your friendship. I think you’ll be glad you did.

A Time to Sow

Pink & Black Ornamental Garden Box

Dear Reader:

There I was yesterday, crouched down next to the garden boxes, dropping miniscule seeds into warm compost, patting a covering of compost over the “babies,” and dreaming of how the boxes will look when the seedlings emerge and begin to grow.

Moth & Chive in the “sunny” perennial bed

Giant bumblebees buzzed around and into the self-propagated purple and pink columbine. Moths and monarch butterflies visited the puffy heads of chives. Birds called. My fingernails turned black, and I didn’t care. I just kept dreaming of the months to come when I could sit and watch the plants grow.

Heirloom tomatoes in straw bale

The day before, after a $100 trip through the greenhouses at Snell’s Family Farm, I had all the starter plants on my list, plus more.

First, the tomatoes. I went with three Early Girl tomatoes, one brandywine called “Mortgage Lifter,” and two green-striped German heirloom tomatoes to go in the straw bales.

Digging out spaces in the bales was tough work. My father was visiting and helped with this chore while Mom watered and carted the extra straw to the compost pile for recycling. The bales were moist and beginning to break down inside nicely, creating some heat that I hope will make for happy tomato plants. After digging into the bales, I put in a couple handfuls of compost, stuck the plant in, and filled in with more compost. Following directions from my straw-bale gardening booklet, I then pressed on a layer of potting soil along the tops of each bale and planted spinach to grow in the shade beneath the toms.

Straw Bale with Front Garden Boxes

On the ends, a circle of pumpkin seeds will hopefully produce a few orange globes come fall. To go along with the “fall harvest” theme of my bales, I took a chance and planted a few corns seeds and some beans on the ground beside the bales. This is now a Three Sisters garden: corn, beans, squash. I’m not expecting much in the way of corn, but the stalks will look festive with the bales and the pumpkins if it all works out.

Inside the Garden Box

As for the boxes, I squished as many varieties into them as I could, intermixing veggies and flowers for visual appeal and maybe to also attract beneficial insects like bees. Already the hummingbird zipped down for a look-see yesterday.

Here is a list of what I planted this weekend:

Herb Box–basil, camomile, calendula, dill, rosemary, fennel, sage, pole beans.
Pink & Black Box–red cabbage, chocolate mint, geranium, Japanese shiso, cucumber, sweet potato vine, petunias.

Salvia & Red Cabbage

Diamond Design Box–salvia, red cabbages, cucumber (and I think something else but I can’t quite remember so it will be a mystery until something comes up between the cabbages.)

Sungold cherry tomato in a pot.

Root crop Box–small onions, carrots, parsnips, radishes, eggplant, geranium.

Peas & Pepper Box–peas, chili peppers, zucchini, summer squash.

Four Greens Boxes–Green leaf, arugula, romaine, greens mix, spinach, a leftover red cabbage, a cherry tomato, a zucchini, a few small onion is a square, and green beans and leftover cukes.

Phew! I spent the better part of two days planting and then sat outside to drink a glass of tea and enjoy the view. I took a shower and went to bed.

After midnight, around 1 a.m., the light show started…a tremendous thunderstorm that ripped through the sky for four hours, dropping torrential rains and some hail. All I could think was, “What about my itty-bitty seeds? What about my tomato plants?”

Luckily, the plants seem fine this morning. Now I have to chose: dig up the soil and replant the seeds or wait for ten or twelve days to see what, if anything, emerges from the compost. I think I’ll wait.

The weather forecast is calling for more t-storms, and I have to go to work at the library today—unlike this luna moth who has been literally hanging around all over my house for a week.

Luna Moth

What is she doing, I wonder? Resting? Waiting to take the next stage in her journey? Maybe that is the lesson for today. It’s all about timing. Rest when you need to. Look forward to the next stage in your journey. Soar when the time is right.

If there ever was a time to sow the seeds of change, it is now. What kind of future do you envision for yourself, your community, the world? What can you plant now for a better tomorrow…in your garden or Outside the Box?

The Mill Has Some Gloss

Dear Reader:

I love old mill towns. I don’t know why this is. Perhaps because I didn’t grow up in a mill town, I am fascinated by the novelty of an industrial-ish landscape. These manufacturing communities are cities, not towns, I suppose, but they are not cities of high-rise apartment buildings, corporate offices for national food chains and banks, and big shopping malls. These Maine city-towns have Main Streets, corner stores, local tobacco shops, and hundred-year-old bakeries; triple-decker apartment buildings that used to house the mill workers, big Catholic cathedrals with a satisfying Gothic flair, and a turn-of-the-century architectural style that for one reason or another sets my creative juices flowing; people who sometimes speak with the slight accent, still, of the St. George River Valley. I love it!

When I lived in Westbrook, my daily walk took me past one of these slumbering manufacturing behmoths that had been built along the tumbling river that once powered the building’s machinery. Incidentally, I would also walk past the still-operating paper mill at the other end of Main Street. I would look up at the even rows of windows, the geometric simplicity of those windows and the pattern of red-orange brick, and imagine an earlier time when people walked from the neighboring streets to punch in to work for the day. They’d be carrying their tin lunch boxes. They’d be tired already, perhaps, at the end of a long week, or else young and cheerful and hopeful.

I’m sure I’m romanticizing the whole thing. That’s my nature.

Since moving even further south, I’ve spent time driving into Sanford, often routing past the empty, old textile buildings there and dreaming of how they could be repurposed. I even wrote two romance novels set in towns like these. Apparently, I’m a little obsessed.

Maybe it has something to do with Richard Russo. His EMPIRE FALLS is brilliant, of course. It is the story of a town and its citizens trying to come to grips with a new economy where manufacturing takes place in China or India or Mexico, and the people left behind at home buy the finished products and struggle to figure out what to do now. I loved EMPIRE FALLS. I recognized it. There is a kind of sad romanticism to these crumbling, quiet buildings. Like Dickens’ Miss Havisham, they’ve seen better days.

Enter Biddeford. I’ve been to this small city many times in the past few years, taking the Teen to the orthodontist and myself to the allergist over near Southern Maine Med, but I’d only visited downtown twice–once to eat at a great little Indian restaurant, The Jewel of India, and another time to have coffee with a friend at the old mill building. So, on a sunny day last week, I decided to check out the refurbished North Dam Mill again–this time with my camera and a notebook in hand.

The first mill established here in the 17th century was an iron manufacturing business. Eventually, large buildings were erected on both the Biddeford and Saco sides of the Saco River and workers flooded into the cities, creating a booming textile manufacturing center. Read about the history and see some great archival photos at the Maine Memory Network site.

Eventually the mills closed. A few years ago, developer Doug Sanford bought the property and re-purposed the wonderful buildings into retail, office, and living space. Click HERE to visit the Pepperell Mill/North Dam Mill website.

On this day, I take a few photos of the impressive smokestack near the parking lot and then stroll into the reception area on the main floor of building 18. The large hallway is dim, with its exposed pipes painted black to blend in with the black ceiling. An expansive red Oriental rug anchors two over-sized leather couches in a sitting area. Right near the windows of a small off-shoot of a hall, a tiny coffee shop wafts acoustic music and the aroma of fresh-ground java.

This is “Perk”…and while I sit at the narrow counter in front of the windows, a few residents drift in to order lunch or coffee. The young guy behind the counter makes pleasant chit-chat with everyone. His co-worker is busy making sandwiches or something. I hear clanging pans behind the music (Sarah Brightman, maybe?)piped in over the speakers

Outside the windows, I can see the river across the road, traffic zipping past, three guys hanging out near the benches and steel flower sculpture near the entrance. Neighbors chatting? I think so.

The entire place makes me think of a castle, the walls rising along the river and road like ramparts, the smokestack a watchtower. Inside are art studios and professional offices on this main floor. A sign beside me reads, “River’s Edge Wood Products: Showroom open on an appointment basis.” Upstairs floors are dedicated to apartments.

I can imagine living here. The exposed pipes. The high ceilings. The well-used hardwood flooring. Mostly, though, I love the idea of living within biking/walking distance to Main St. and all the great local stores and restaurants and the library. The Amtrak station is a short walk, as well, for trips to Boston and beyond. Living close to neighbors. Stopping for a morning latte at Perk.

This is a New-Urbanists dream! Click HERE to read about New Urbanism. Walkability. Diversity of purpose. Community and connectivity. Traditional neighborhood structure. Common space. I’d like to see a community garden somewhere here–maybe on the roof!

I took this picture from a little patio off the parking lot overlooking the river. The Saco side of the mills are across the water.

Isn’t the juxtaposition between the old water/coal-powered mill and the new, space-agey windmill great? To me this symbolizes the future . . . if we have the guts and willpower to transition to a more sustainable way of life. A way where we go back to our more densely-populated urbans centers, our Main Street stores owned by our neighbors, and our sense of community purpose while at the same time taking advantage of new technologies and ideas and art.

I want to wake up and smell the coffee . . . at places like Perk!

Day 14: Mojitos In The Square

Pentagon Row "Town Square"

Dear Reader:

Day 14 was a typical day spent completely in my neighborhood. I woke around seven o’clock, brewed some coffee, and read more of Phyllis Theroux’s inspiring book while listening to the sounds of George Winston playing on Pandora.com.

After my coffee/music/reading hour I headed down to the gym to lift weights, something that I’ve been neglecting more than not over the past couple of weeks. The scale in the gym showed a one-pound weight-loss which is either good (all that walking is burning more calories than I thought) or bad (I’m losing muscle mass due to laziness and inactivity.) I choose to believe it is the walking but also vow to get down there three times a week for the remainder of the summer just in case.

After a shower, breakfast, and a blog post, I laced up my Sketchers and walked through Pentagon Row to the grocery store. I love strolling down the brick-paved sidewalks and looking in shop windows, passing people walking their dogs or pushing baby carriages or sitting at outdoor cafe tables enjoying a coffee or a meal. The mixed-use character of our neighborhood is comfortable and welcoming and convenient in ways that a typical suburban housing development is not. How did this human-scale neighborhood come about, anyway, I wondered.

When I looked up the history of the development of Pentagon Row, I discovered an article on the New Urban Network praising the thoughtful development of this neighborhood.

“Pentagon Row charts an exciting direction in urban retail and residential development — it embraces smart-growth initiatives to serve a community and captures the romantic spirit of living above the shop.”

The article goes on to outline the process of developing this 18-acre site which was originally zoned only for housing. By mixing housing with retail and community space–rather than separating them as developers in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s were wont to do–a walkable, neighborly, human-scale village was created in the middle of the metropolitan D.C. area.

This kind of development is also called Traditional Neighborhood Development. From an article by the National Association of Home Builders and posted on the Legacy Town Square (another planned neighborhood) website:

“Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND), also called Neotraditional Development or the New Urbanism, refers to a pattern of land planning and development that emulates the towns and suburbs built in the early to mid-20th century more than the automobile-dominated suburbs of the 1960s and beyond. While the typical suburbs and planned communities built since the 1960s have stressed a separation of uses and great emphasis on the automobile, traditional neighborhood development stresses a walkable scale, an integration of different housing types and commercial uses, and the building of true town centers with civic uses.”

When Hubby said we were going to be living in a ninth-floor apartment, I didn’t realize I was going to be living in the middle of a New Urban neighborhood, just the kind of place I’ve been reading and writing about the past few years. So now, when I talk about the wisdom of New Urban principals, I can do so with some authority. I’ve experienced it first hand–and I love it!

Shops on the Square

Hubby was home from work early when I arrived back home from my walk to the grocery store. Since the Teen had hurt her leg exercising the previous night and was busy learning how to use her new cell phone (yes, we finally figured out which phone/plan would be suitable), we went down to the gym to work out on the elliptical machines for an hour and then lazed around the outdoor pool and read through the worst heat of the day. The pool is surrounded by pretty black-iron fencing interwoven with bright-green vines, concrete planters overflowing with magenta impatiens, dark-leafed tropical foliage and spiky, green tropical plants, and lounge chairs and tables with dark-orange umbrellas. Moms and dads help their children learn to swim, teens and twenty-somethings tap away on their cell phones, women and men read and sun themselves. Here is something about the people who live in this apartment building–everybody reads. Whenever I come down to the pool almost every single adult and many of the teens have a book in hand. What does this say about the community? I’ll let you decide.

After our swim, Hubby and I strolled over to the square where the Thursday evening concert was underway. A two-person band mutilated some Steve Windwood and U2 songs from the stage in front of the water fountain, but their hearts were in the right place, and it was fun to sip a couple of blackberry Mojitos and eat Cobb salad at an outdoor table and watch the little kids running around on the grassy area in front of us while the band played. It looked like half the neighborhood decided to hang out in the square last night. We watched people of all sizes, shapes, colors, and dress wander past our table. There were the almost-furtive smokers standing outside restaurant doorways, dog-walkers, dads carrying their babies in slings, groups of girlfriends out for a drink or two after work, shoppers with bags stopping by for an ice-cream or coffee at Starbucks (I do wish there were a locally-owned coffee shop instead, but that is a small complaint) after a successful foray in the shops.

After all that exercise and stimulation (not to mention the two mojitos), I practically fell into bed and a deep sleep. These Thursday concerts remind me of when Hubby and I were first married, living in our apartment over J.J. Newberry’s in Farmington and going to the town park for the weekly band performances. Farmington is also one of those towns, like Alexandria, that the New Urbanists use as templates for their community designs. We did, in fact, live “above the shop.” We could walk to the grocery store, the movie theater, the pharmacy, the gift shop, and a nice variety of restaurants. When we bought our first house, that town, too, had a Maine street with housing and retail and schools all mixed together.

Why did we stray so far from what we knew? Why did the automobile change the entire structure of our housing developments? Having lived in both traditional neighborhoods and in a 1960’s cul-de-sac exurban housing development, I find it hard to believe anybody would deliberately chose to live cut off from the vibrancy and community that the “town,” with its retail business, civic spaces, and gathering spots, provides. What was the charm of suburban housing development with its little houses all in a row, serpentine roads that led nowhere, and nothing to do but sit in the back yard staring at . . . nothing but the fence between you and the neighbors’ back yard?

So the question remains: Can we remake these single-use sprawls into something truly liveable, walkable, and sustainable? It will take changing “by-laws” and renegotiating zoning to allow retail development, types of buildings (not only single-family homes but also apartments above retail shops, apartment-type buildings, etc.), sidewalks, and lamp posts. It can happen, but do enough people want to do it? Probably not, at least not now and probably not until it is too late.

We Cambridged, We Saw, and We Concord

For several years now I have wanted to visit Cambridge, Massachusetts. Why Cambridge, you ask? Sometime just before junior high school, I had gone through my parents’ collection of books stored on shelves in the basement and came across a paperback edition of Erich Segal’s book, LOVE STORY. I read it, understanding not much except that she was a young girl who dies. What kind of writer, I wondered, kills off the heroine like that? Stupid book, I thought. I’d go back to my ANN OF GREEN GABLES, thank you very much.

(In eighth grade my teacher gave me a copy of WHERE THE RED FERN GROWS, and I realized that heroes die in some books so I’d better get used to it. Two years later I read GONE WITH THE WIND and discovered that even epic love stories can have tragic endings. Don’t even get me started on ANNA KARENINA.)

Sunny courtyard seen through an archway

Anyway, LOVE STORY was my first literary journey to Harvard and Radcliffe, The Coop, Widener Library, and rowing on the Charles River. After that, I had a fascination with Harvard. For me it has been this sort of ideal–as if all that history and learning and writing and lecturing and studying has bonded into the brick and stone structures, permeated the leaves of the trees in Harvard Yard, seeped into the water of the river down which preppy boys skim in long, thin boats. If only I could get there, I fantasized, perhaps some of that intellectual wondrousness (think Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Adams, Al Gore, Matt Damon . . .) would rub off on me.

Plus it just sounded like a really cool, historical, happening place to visit.

So, last weekend when my friend, Donna, invited me to attend her reunion at Lesley University, a small liberal arts college right next door to Harvard, I jumped at the opportunity.

This is Lesley University’s Admissions building.

The entire campus is housed in these beautiful, renovated, Victorian-era houses snuggled up together on tree-shaded streets just off Massachusetts Avenue. If you Google Map it, look for Wendell Street.

Here I am on the steps of the dormitory hall where we stayed. The three-story house was tall and narrow with five or six rooms on each floor. A wooden staircase wound up from the front entrance hall to the two upper stories. Pretty posh living quarters for undergraduates, I thought.

The Coop Bookstore and Cafe

Refreshed and revived, we didn’t stay in our room for long–just about enough time to throw our bags on the bed and eat a brownie from the fabulous table of food downstairs in the common room. Donna gave me a tour of Lesley and then showed me where she used to cut through Harvard to get to stores and whatnot.

Street performer on a unicycle playing the bagpipes in a kilt

Sure enough, we came out near Harvard Square where you can catch the T, watch street performers, browse for books in The Coop, have coffee at one of the many, many coffee shops, and window-shop for shoes that cost more than I spend on groceries for a month.

Cambridge River Festival

Donna and I were lucky to be here the same weekend as the Cambridge River Festival, a celebration of the arts set up along the Charles. About 2 pm, we slipped into a tent to enjoy a presentation of storytelling by some very talented local teenagers, viewed some performance art (guy dressed up like a giant, slightly creepy, white angel) and then went back to Harvard Square in search of coffee at The Coop.

Once we’d had our fill of mocha lattes and book browsing, we walked around the city for a few more hours enjoying the pretty, landscaped dooryards, quaint neighborhoods, campus buildings, and shop windows. Cambridge really is a walkable city, the kind of place New Urbanists claim we most enjoy living in.

Roses gracing the sidewalk

What are the priciples of New Urbanism?
1. Walkability
2. Connectivity
3. Mixed use and diversity
4. Mixed housing
5. Quality architecture and Urban Design
6. Traditional neighborhood structure
7. Increased density
8. Green transportation
9. Sustainability
10.Quality of life

Of course, Cambridge is an OLD urban model. It is the kind of place the New Urbanists look to for inspiration. Cambridge has the elelments we’ve been missing in all our unsustainable suburbs and exurban housing developments.

Here, you can shop, eat, learn, sleep, exercise, work and play all in the same place without having to get into a car. You can walk or bike or ride the T or catch a bus. The architecture is stunning. The quality of life is fantastic–all those institutions of learning, the emphasis on culture and the arts, the plethora of caffeinated beverages. I felt energized just being there for one weekend. Imagine living somewhere even a little bit like that.

Sign at the Farmer's Market

On Sunday morning, Donna and I even discovered a farmer’s market in Charles Square. We bought bread, sampled cheesecake, perused the greens, and admired the booths. I watched people buying bags of veggies, tubs of goat cheese and long sticks of baguettes and envied them their local lunch.

Donna at the Farmer's Market

We ate a small lunch at an outside table in front of a coffee shop and headed back to Harvard for more sightseeing. I was determined to see Widener Library before we left Cambridge, and Donna wanted to find a church she had attended a few times when she was at Lesley.

Ironically, you CAN park your car at Harvard Yard . . . or pretty close to it, anyway. When we had arrived at Lesley the day before, we were given a pass to park at Harvard’s underground Oxford Street parking lot. Now we stopped to see the buildings around Harvard Yard on our way back to the garage.

Widener Library

Widener Library was closed on Sunday morning, but was still impressive in its huge massiveness. The thought of all those books housed in such a beautiful structure makes me giddy!

Memorial Church

We found Memorial Church, and snapped a few pictures. It was built in 1932 as a memorial to those who had died in World War I and to serve as Harvard’s church.

Pretty grounds at Harvard University

The day was getting late, and so with reluctance we found the parking garage and said farewell to Cambridge. Heading home, we decided to swing through Concord–home to some pretty famous writers back in the day. We drove past Thoreau’s Walden Pond. A little ways down the road was something even more remarkable and heartwarming . . . a community garden!

Community garden just outside Concord

Here where a few of our country’s great writers–Thoreau, Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and Nat Hawthorne–penned some pretty amazing American Literature, modern Concordians not only enjoy reading but also like growing their own food. According to the official Concord, MA website, “Concord has long supported community gardens and in 2010 has three community gardens on town land with over 100 plots. The burgeoning interest in gardening and local food production has ensured that two of the three gardens are subscribed to capacity, though there is limited turnover from year to year. East Quarter Farm Gardens, near Ripley School, was established in 2009 and still has plots available.”

Three community gardens on public land! Over one hundred plots! Two are filled to capacity!

There in a quaint, old, respected, historical, classy community we find three community gardens, while here in my exurban subdivision carved out of old farmland we have none because some people don’t want to live next door to a garden. How sad–and stupid. When is my community going to wake up?

Emerson's House

Perhaps if I were as effective a writer as Emerson or Thoreau, I could convince my fellow community members to find a place for a communal garden space, to change the bylaws which allow cutting trees in order to put in a swimming pool but not for a sunny garden area, and to begin changing our subdivision from a car-centric, single-use, unsustainable, exurban backwater into a walkable, mixed-use, connected, sustainable, green community.

Cambridge house on side-street

Or maybe I just need to get out of Dodge for awhile.

Stay tuned in the next week or so as Outside the Box travels to Washington D.C.

Short Post: Listen to Program #2–Small Towns and Cities

I’m not a big one for podcasts, but stumbled onto James Howard Kunstler’s online radio program the other day and recommend it for anyone who is interested in the future of our cities, town, and rural areas. (Click on the green link and the page should come up. Scroll down and you’ll see a black podcast player with a list of episodes.)

James Kunstler is a journalist/novelist who has spent the past few decades observing and commenting on what he calls the “Happy Motoring” Suburban American life. Kunstler is funny, articulate, and I believe dead on when it comes to the future of our society. To get you started, I recommend scrolling down to the #2 program on the site–“Small Towns and Cities.”

Sprawling Apart

Lady's Mantle Sprawl

Dear Reader:

Here in my rural subdivision, life goes on as usual–at least on the surface of things. The Fourth of July weekend brought an unusually large number of ATV’s careening down our (posted) roads, an impressive parade of decorated motorboats chugging across the lake, and a barage of illegal fireworks booming behind the sheltering pines from dusk ’til midnight. The smell of grilled meat wafted across shaggy, soggy yards. Neighbors we hardly ever see strolled by, blinking in the novelty of sunlight after two straight weeks of rain. Friends stopped in for potato salad, bratwursts, and strawberry shortcake.

Looking around, you’d never know there was a recession on or staggering-close-to-ten percent unemployment or a war. Maybe that’s part of our American charm–our optimistic belief that sooner or later everything will work out just fine and yankee-doodle dandy. The ungraspable debt will be paid off. Terrorism will be defeated forever. Want ads will sprout like weeds in the classifieds section of the newspaper. Solar and wind power will totally replace oil energy. We will go back to building our subdivisions, taking thirteen car trips per day, and listening to talk radio on our hour-long commutes to and from work in the city.

The fact is, people here in Maine (like the rest of the country) LIKE suburbia.

In 1999 the Maine State Planning Office conducted two homebuyer surveys to see where people were moving and why. They discovered that 42% of people who were buying homes opted to move from a city to the suburbs or rural outlying area. 33% were already in a suburban setting and moved to another suburban setting. An analysis of the survey sums up:

These homebuyers appear to value being within walking distance of
a corner store and the library, knowing neighbors by name, knowing
they can drop by a neighbor’s home and that he or she will feel
comfortable doing the same. They say they would as soon be close to
gyms, ball fields, movie theaters, and cultural activities as be able
to walk out the back door to hunt, fish, ski, or snowmobile. They
value running into friends and acquaintances at the coffee shop on
Main Street as well as seeing wildlife out the windows of their home,
and visiting neighbors on their porches after dinner as much as
watching a solitary sunset from their homes. Some prefer privacy to
contact with neighbors but still want proximity to stores and services
and don’t want to be forced to get their privacy by moving to largelot
suburbs or the country. Still others may prefer a rural setting,
but if they knew they were contributing to the loss of wildlife
habitat, working farms and woodlands, or open space around towns, they
would reconsider.

The sad fact is, the suburban model of housing development is so ubiquitous that we homebuyers feel we have no other choice than to move to the suburbs if we want to escape conjested streets, too-close neighbors, concrete landscapes, and social isolation. This urban sprawl has eaten into our valuable agricultural land and has eroded wildlife habitat. Ironically, when we do move to the suburbs in search of a sense of community and small-town neighborliness, we are often disappointed. Let’s take each of the values listed by homebuyers and compare those values to the realities of my homeowner’s association (which shall remain nameless.)

#1 Walking distance to corner store and library: We can’t. My housing development was built in the 1960’s on rural land at the edges of two separate towns. We have very few points of entry from town roads and state routes, and there are no sidewalks or even breakdown lanes amenable to walking or even bicycling, even if we were inclined to walk or bike the miles between our home and the distant town centers. Zoning rules prevent any retail development in our association, so we have no coffee shops, corner stores, booksellers, or newspaper stands within walking distance. The only businesses of which I’m aware are home-based childcare operations and perhaps some telecomuters working out of their basement offices.

#2 Knowing the neighbors by name: In old-fashioned, small-town or city neighborhoods in years gone by, houses were built close to the street. You knew all the neighbors and their kids. You chatted with them over the picket fence dividing your properties and waved at them from your front porch. You sat in each others’ kitchens and drank coffee. You worked with them at businesses in town. You went to church with them on Sunday.

While this theoretically can take place in a subdivision, the reality is much different. Built on a series of cul-de-sacs, our houses sit back from the road. Decks and porches are relegated to the private, backyard area rather than the social, front lawn area. Few of us work in our actual towns, commuting instead to jobs in the city. We have no churches or other traditional gathering places in our association, though we do have a couple of clubhouses. We have compartmentalized our lives–working one place, socializing another, coming home to the subdivision to sleep. We could make more of an effort with our neighbors–probably should–but neither the design of the subdivision nor our car-driven lifestyle lends itself to old-fashioned neighborliness.

#3 Close to gyms, ballfields, cultural activies, etc.: This we have. Our homeowner’s association amenities include an outdoor pool, two indoor pools, tennis courts, clubhouses with billiard tables and meeting rooms, etc. Most of us could walk to at least some of these amenities, and the use of them is included in our association dues. Sadly, while we have the space for cultural activities that might invite more civic participation and neighborly interaction, we homeowners are so disconnected that these sorts of activities are rarely planned and sparsely attended. The infrastructure is there, however. While we can’t do anything about the road layout, we could, if we wanted, hang out at the gym or hold movie nights at the clubhouse.

#4 Wildlife out the window: Ah, we have this, too. Our rural subdivision has wildlife preserves in place, dirt roads, a lake with lots of marshy areas, and quite a few undeveloped (and undevelopable) lots. I’ve seen deer, moose, loons, herons, foxes, and turtles while driving or walking in my neighborhood or canoeing on the lake. Proximity to nature–animals, trees, wildflowers, wild berries–is a big plus. We can swim in the lake, hang out on one of the many association beaches, cross-country ski through the woods, and sit outside beneath a shady beech or oak tree.

All in all, my rural subdivision is a pretty good place to live . . . for now.

But what happens when things go wrong? If energy costs become too prohibitive and traveling back and forth to school, to the grocery store, and to work becomes a financial hardship, many of us may choose to leave. Others of us will be stuck here whether we like it or not, struggling to figure out a way to live in a place with very little to offer in an energy-depleted world.

Would it be possible to transform our suburbs into sustainable communities where we could shop, work, and play all within walking distance of our homes? Or would the suburbs become the future American slums as some New Urbanists predict?

While we still may have some time before the realities of peak oil hit (when demand outstrips supply in a real way as opposed to the artificial shortages of the 1970’s), the time to address the cons of our suburban design while continuing to protect the pros is now.

The Maine State Planning Office survey revealed that those same homebuyers who were flocking to subdivisions would just as soon live in walkable, urban communities if city and town neighborhoods were planned to reduce traffic, to provide areas for privacy as well as common areas for community, and to design parks and other wildlife areas. Adding a good pubic transportation system within the urban neighborhood will also be a big plus on the side of urban development. State planners encourage this kind of New Urbanist vision as a way to reduce sprawl into our valuable agricultural and wild rural areas, and there are indications that buyers are already moving back to the urban centers. Click here to read about The Great American Neighborhood program. How will our old sprawling subdivisions fare in competition? How soon before home values begin to fall?

If we want to protect our investment, we’d best be thinking about how to provide those things that future homebuyers will be seeking and the current subdivision model doesn’t provide. We need to think about transitioning our single-family residential communities into walkable, mixed-use villages where people can work and worship and play and shop. We need to devise some kinds of “Main Street” areas for community gatherings and cultural activities, and we need to figure out how to provide public transportation. We need to think about education and how to get our schools back into our neighborhoods rather than on the edges of town. It wouldn’t hurt if we figured out how to feed ourselves by promoting the creation of backyard and community gardens, farmer’s markets, and food co-ops.

If we don’t take care, those who can will go elsewhere . . . and the rest of us will be stuck at the end of our cul-de-sacs wondering how it all went wrong.