She had written, “I am putting the keys on the back side of the small white fence to the left of the house. it is in a magnet key lock on the other side of the fence. The combination is 207.”

Seemed simple enough, but these kinds of things always fill me with a kind of dread, that somehow I missed a crucial detail which will cause me to end up stranded, or at least significantly uncomfortable.  That the apartment was the only residential building on an otherwise broad-streeted, corner-gas-station, whizzing-car block added to my slight unsettled feeling.

So.  We saw a white fence, check.  But, hm.  It was padlocked shut.  Same with the fence on the other side of the house.  Shake the fence, no luck.  Any evidence of a key? Nope.  Note for us on the front porch? Nope.

Rain on the pavement.  Slow soaking of my suede shoes.  Tap tap tap goes the bathroom dance.  I feel panic starting to rise up the outsides of my neck.  I know we’ll figure it out, but can feel the panic slowly threatening to take over my mind into worry and frustration.  Husband paces, stepdad paces.  Keep panic at bay, keep warm, focus on problem solving.  Try the gate again, reread the text message.  Pass the phone, read the message aloud.  Fence, door, phone.

“So, um, Deedee?”

“Yeah, Jason?”

“So is this, like, a mystery adventure?  Did they leave you a code, and now you have to go on a search, and then you’ll find a secret key, and then figure out how to use the code?  Can I help you look for the mystery?”

Whoa.

“You know,” I said, “that’s a really great way to think about it.”

It takes a kid to turn your anxiety on its head like that.

I told myself to be patient as he now peppered me with questions about every step of the “investigation,” wanting to open the lockbox himself (we did find it, eventually), and insisting that he help us carry our luggage into the house, even though it weighed as much as he did.  And by the time we were inside, I was in a curious mood myself, wondering if I would be the one with such superlative instincts as to be able to discover the location of my host’s invisible cat (I was).

With his little voice, piping up in the midst of my slowly rising discomfort and worry, my brother had reminded me that all it takes is curiosity, to turn worry into an adventure.

I’ve written before about these charismatic urbanfauna and how they can be understood by planners as an example of how surprising interventions can facilitate building social capital.  But here, I was thinking about them differently, as local “characters of interest,” subjects of community mythmaking.

That’s all I’ll say.  Except: this is my first podcast.  And, I hope, it’s a preview of coming attractions.  Since so much of this blog is about walking, and pretty much all I do as I’m walking around cities is listen to podcasts, it seems only natural.

Podcast: My Avatar is a Turkey

Data on turkey populations and behaviors in this podcast comes from the National Wild Turkey Federation, an article by Keith O’Brien in the Boston Globe (October 23, 2007), and one by Scott Wachtler in the Cambridge Tab ( Jul 15, 2011).  Beaky and Tammy are on twitter.  If you enter the search term “Cambridge Urban Turkeys” into your browser,  you’ll find all kinds of footage from around town.

Thanks to my neighbors, who gave me their time and their imaginations.  My husband Brian, who was my hunting partner.  Many thanks as well to Aditi, Stefanie, and Alexa, the facilitators of the CoLab Storytelling for Planners course, and to my classmates for their thoughtful feedback and technical assistance.

This podcast also appears as a post at MIT CoLab Radio.

Posted 10/18/12: “There was an arson ring that was burning down the Fenway neighborhood in the mid-70′s.
This was taken on Symphony Rd. October 1974. It’s now a vacant lot. Thanks Larry.”

So…what’s going on here?  Let’s talk about the Dirty Old Boston phenomenon for a minute.  Hypotheses please.

1. Childhood nostalgia.  The “likers” and the photos are perfectly in sync to suggest that they could be thinking back to the Boston of their childhood, using social media to create a nostalgia community like Millenials who wanted their childhood television shows back.

2. Love that dirty water.  Gentrification here feels a bit like a dirty word that implies loss of authenticity, commercialization of spaces and experiences (it’s the TD Banknorth Garden now!?), and, perhaps especially important, the incursion of outsiders into the community.  This happens in two ways.  There’s the Starbucks-in-Southie, no-Italians-in-the-North-End narrative of middle class yuppies taking over Boston’s prized working class neighborhoods, but there’s also the corporate high-rise, courting of global pharmaceuticals and displacement of rock clubs, affordable housing, and social service organizations in Cambridge story.  The first is a story about the middle class takeover of working-class, long-established, white-ethnic neighborhoods; the latter is more about triumph of global capitalist interests over local, home-grown activist culture. They are both narratives of fear about cultural and class change; different classes in Boston live more cheek-by-jowl than in many other American cities; it is less income segregated than other metro-areas with similar levels of inequality (about average nationally).  In this context, chronicling their pre-gentrification history, dirty or not, might feel like a way for “real” Bostonian’s to claim ownership over the identity of the city — “you weren’t here then, so you wouldn’t remember how things used to be, but I do.”  Similarly, if newcomers also see themselves as not “real” Bostonians, then they (we) might feel it’s important to identify with and learn about the past and incorporate themselves into Boston’s identity.

3.  All in the family.  Maybe Boston is small enough that everyone feels like they have stories about the images that are portrayed, and connections with the sites represented.  A slight variation: Boston as a “city of neighborhoods” means that people might feel passionate enough about seeing their places represented that anything like this gets folks excited.

4. Everybody <3s ruin porn.  We can’t deny, as I’ve talked about before, that old stuff is just generally of interest now.  And then there’s of course the Mad Men effect, which is still going on.  But seeing as the page’s primary “like” base is Bostonians, I think there’s a strong case to be made that this is not just about that.

5. Working out trauma.  The razing of the West End, the Central Artery, the citizen activism against the expressway, the Big Dig…Boston still has a lot of very present anger, sadness, and pride about the big planning decisions that were implemented or thwarted in the past century.  Maybe Dirty Old Boston is touching that nerve.

Is this a uniquely Boston phenomenon?  What other cities have an idealized sense of a “gritty” past that is still present today?  And for whom do you think this past is more important: the old-timers, or the new transplants?  And what do we want, beneath the ogling — to remember and share our memories with peers, like those ’90s kids, to stop the changes that are going on, or to find a common language for talking about what it means to be From Boston?

I learned a lot about how to (and how not to) put on dinner parties, and I also experienced some changing thinking about the nature of community building and public space — but that’s a topic for another post.  Today, I want to introduce a series of posts I’ll be producing throughout the rest of the fall, which I’m calling “Seeking the Salt of the Earth.”

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that I’m fascinated by the telling of collective origin stories.  Exhibitions, consumption patterns, historic preservation strategies, rituals and practices, and design aesthetics that deal with questions like: Who are we?  What parts of our pasts do we celebrate? How do we deal with the physical reminders, in our environment, of things we’d rather forget? What kind of past do we need in order to become the community we want to be?  And how do we pass these stories down to our children?

An especially powerful origin story — in America, at least — is the working class origin story.  Often woven together with immigration myths of families and communities, personal connection to a working class origin is understood as the key for personal, and collective, authenticity. I think part of this comes from the perception that the working class, whether rural or urban, somehow have a deeper connection to place and community.  They are of the earth.  They are also of their bodies, using their hands for work, as well as their problem solving minds.

In this series I’m going to explore a range of tools and strategies that individuals, communities, and companies use to evoke a sense of working class origins.  I’ll ask why they do so, and what the connection to the working class means.  If you have suggestions for funny, puzzling, or meaningful cases of “salt of the earth” ism, let me know!  I’d especially love to look at multimedia examples.

But there were some other themes and questions that developed over the day that were new to me, or were expressed in new ways.  They were very interested in pace — the pace at which we move through the city, and what it takes to interrupt our frantic pace to introduce lingering, stopping. They also engaged time through questions of temporality and permanence, of incremental steps versus big gestures. And perhaps most interestingly, many of them engaged multiple ground planes, considering verticality — what would happen if we put a park underground?  why can’t there be an observatory tower?  — in a way that I found very refreshing in our world of ground-floor retail obsession.  We discussed alternative conceptions of public space as a result, pushing ourselves as a group to consider possibilities beyond a green park on the street level, and how to introduce whimsy into a city environment in a way that’s effective and engaging.  Some students also introduced the possibility of a “city as lab” approach to redevelopment, using comment cards, hands-on university curricula, and other tools to introduce agenda-setting and incremental processes beyond community meetings.  Sometimes these proposals were inchoate, their potential only fleshed out through the review process, but that’s the point.

These projects were instructive not only for their content but also for what they did not focus on.  Their studio project focused on Downtown Crossing, the only Business Improvement District in the city of Boston, and their proposals almost universally focused on consumption or leisure.  In a district home to over 150 jewelers, for example, no one produced a project that engaged jewelry making, artisan production, or economic development beyond shopping and dining.  Why?  What can we learn about the intuitive components of city experience from this?

Another lovely thing that came up was the relationship between research and proposals — that planners need to develop an intuitive understanding of a place before they plan interventions.  Their tentativeness, their unwillingness to propose things that weren’t appropriate, that betrayed their ignorance not just of the field but of the site, was an important reminder about the benefits of humility in a field that essentially involves changing how and where others live.  I was reminded as we proceeded through the day about the concept of beginner’s mind, which seems to come up for me a lot (most recently in Jonah Lehrer’s excellent book Imagine) — unencumbered by the expectations of doctrinaire disciplinary thinking, these students had the possibility of introducing new ideas into the site that might never be explored.  An aviary, an amphitheatre, a first-class lounge waiting area for the subway where people can meet at the center of the city and take in concerts and exhibitions…why not?  Exactly.  Whyever not?

This year, it’s meant thinking about what it takes to produce meaningful conversations about identity and history.  In part, that’s because I’m working on some non-Passover projects about this myself: I’m finally launching Terroir Studio, a kind of roving collaborative initiative for exploring how we can use food and meals to help us create a sense of community and learn about the places we call home.

Another reason why Passover has resonated so much with me this year is that  Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander have released their New American Haggadah, prompting a broader conversation about the role of a text, and the discussion and telling of stories, in family and community traditions.  Foer perfectly summarized my own feeling about the Seder in an interview with NPR’s Rachel Martin: “While it is possible for a family to gather for an extended meal and a discussion about individual and community identity, most people won’t do it without the impetus of a religion.”  The Seder dinner is an invitation to discussion, to argument, to critique and close reading, a call to reflection for Jewish families and their friends — Jewish or not — around the world. Nathan Englander in interviews has explained the importance of this project for his own personal spiritual journey — he’s an atheist, though raised an Orthodox Jew — recalling the Jewish tradition of debating the words in a text and translation and its relationship to his own love of language.  I think it’s incredible that this holiday is designed specifically to create an environment in which all members of a community (including the very youngest, who has a special role as question-asker in the Seder ritual) must hash out the stories that they tell about themselves and what they mean for their future.

In fact, Passover is a living ritual: it is meant to be recreated every year in a way that will make it relevant to the present day.  Every family celebrates in a way that is meaningful to them, though they maintain a fellowship with the many other Jews in many other circumstances who celebrate on the same evening, and who have celebrated in the past.  This is no surprise, for a holiday that tells the story that has inspired so many social movements throughout history.  Liberal and secular Seders often go even further, incorporating the traditions of other social movements into the celebration of Passover itself, including slave songs such as “Let My People Go,” putting olives on the Seder plate to symbolize hope for Middle East peace, reading the words of Martin Luther King. Even a traditional Hagaddah, like Englander and Safran-Foer’s, allows for the tradition of contemporary interpretation alongside the text, providing opportunities for discussion, questioning, and illumination based on themes, even as the ritual is preserved as originally designed.  This kind of evolving experience, based on a text, a collective sense of history, and a set of values, is the power of the Seder.

This year I attended a Humanist Seder with the Chaplain of my community here at Harvard, which really hit home how the Seder can create an amazing framework for conversation.  In this Seder, the Passover story was barely even part of the conversation; we treated it as a piece of literature, a prompt towards a structured discussion about slavery, freedom, and shared identity.  Two of our guests were not Jewish and had never celebrated Passover, so the story of Moses was conveyed through storytelling rather than ritual text.  But our dinner table conversation included the challenges of race in America, the role of religion in our own lives, the practice of Easter and its liturgical and experiential practice in the Catholic church, as one of our attendees had lived in Rome for many years.  I can’t think of another time that I had such meaningful discussions with peers, not to mention strangers!

To me it seems no surprise that this conversation takes place over a meal, in the home, as opposed to in public.  And I think this is an important takeaway from the Seder.  We have this idea, many of us, that the civic sphere, where we discuss important topical issues with those of a like and a different mind, is something that is public, that these kinds of conversations are what take place at public meetings, rallies, neighborhood parties.  I think I think that, or at least, my writing on this site probably suggests that I do.  But much of the civic capacity in a country is actually (or at least, historically has been) built around the conversations we have at the dinner table, with family and friends.  When done well, these kinds of conversations help us to define and debate our values, tell stories about our past and our identities, to learn how to speak our minds and listen to others, to welcome guests of different backgrounds and different stories.  What would it take for us to have Seders more than once a year, whether we’re Jewish or not?

Stay tuned as Terroir Studio tries to answer that question!

Click to view slideshow.

This is Haymarket, Boston’s historic wholesale produce market.  It dates to the early 19^th century as part of a market district that comprised Quincy Market and the fishing docks in the North End.

The market has existed in its current location since 1952, when the state relocated the market from Haymarket Square (nearby) in order to erect perhaps the most important — and impermeable — border in Boston’s history, the Central Artery.  The market’s current condition continues to be bound up in the story of the Artery.

Today, the Central Artery has been undergrounded through the Big Dig, and the boundary has been reimagined as a “seam”, the Rose Kennedy Greenway park.  The development of the Greenway has followed Downtown Boston’s overall redevelopment, which began with the Harbor cleanup and the development of the Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market festival marketplace in the 1970s.  The Haymarket vendors, referred to as “hawkers” in the 1952 ordinance and organized in the “Haymarket Pushcart Association”, are a historic remnant in the midst of this reimagining of space, capital, and consumption in the Downtown Boston area.  It runs on Friday and Saturdays, selling produce remnants at very low prices to bargain hunters from around the Boston area.

The maket is messy, smelly, noisy, rude, and only loosely regulated by the city and state.  Adjacent businesses lament the weekly disruption of their increasingly upscale clientele, and the city, though recognizing the heritage and food access value of the market, wishes there were some way to realize the economic value of the adjacent real estate.  Market vendors have changed too — vendors are increasingly immigrant and non-English speaking, though the original Italian families do still form a significant portion of the stalls.  Most of the vendors are no longer Boston residents, either; between this and their cash-only business, the city has an even harder time justifying their support in fiscal terms.

In fact, the market has begun to play a different role in the city’s fabric.  Though still a place for the frugal and under-resourced to “score” inexpensive fruits and vegetables, many shoppers value Haymarket for its nostalgia value and the environment of “authentic Boston” that it produces.   They describe the old-world hustle bustle, thick Boston accents, multicultural and socioeconomically diverse clientele, and impenetrable market customs as part of the appeal, inscribing cultural meaning onto this ephemeral expression of heritage in urban space.

What I wonder about is the extent to which the very ephemerality of this market, as a sort of impressionistic expression of this border condition — not only between physical spaces, but between time periods — is part of the driver of this new cultural value.  The dynamic nature of the market serves not only as an aesthetic stimulus but also as a cultural experience that makes local residents feel like tourists in their own city, consumers of the market itself, not of its wares.

It’s this attitude towards the market that interests me, because at this time the State is working to develop a permanent indoor farmer’s market in the site directly adjacent to the Haymarket.  Advocates for this new market also frame their efforts in terms of authenticity, saying that they want to revive the market tradition of the district and bring farm foods to the city once again.  So there’s kindof a battle between claims to authenticity happening in this space, and the territory on which the battle is waged is shifting, because of the temporariness of the architecture.

City planning officials hope to see Haymarket capture some of the revenue for the new market and establish new, permanent stalls as well as standardized, upgraded temporary tents, like those you’d see at a farmer’s market.  I wonder what the impact of this changed physical architecture might be on the sense of identity, cross-cultural exchange and expeditionism of the market.  Might Haymarket as it exists now, because of its ephemerality, constitute a “neutral ground” between traditions and constituencies in the city?

Turkeys? In Cambridge, you say?

Yes.

Here they are, in the front yard of a neighboring apartment building, the first morning I saw them.  In the late morning, on my way to a meeting, about a week before Thanksgiving.

Yes, a week before Thanksgiving.

Temporal coincidences aside, the first time I noticed them, I snapped this photo, sent it to my husband (who was at work) via iPhone, and continued along my way, chuckling.  I noticed some hours later that the Cambridge Chronicle had shared a tweet with its followers about a resident who had also seen turkeys.  I wasn’t crazy, I now knew, wasn’t fostering some kind of weird pre-holiday illusion about festive charismatic fauna in my neighborhood. I tweeted back.

So the next morning, when I saw a couple of people gathered around the front yard of a different neighbor’s house, I knew it had to be the turkeys.  They were talking animatedly to each other, curious about something.

“Turkeys?!” I asked.

“Yes!” they responded.

We watched the birds peck their way through the side yard until they were out of sight.  The woman introduced herself to me.  “Do you live in the neighborhood?” she asked.  “Yes, around the corner.” “I live in this house here [indicating the house next door].” “Oh! I always admire your paint job.”  “Thank you.  Nice to meet you!”

In the following days, every time I saw the turkeys, I would talk with someone around me.  One person asked if I thought someone was keeping them, for Thanksgiving dinner (I thought not.)  Others just shared amused glances.  When I ran into a friend who lives nearby, at our local coffee shop, I asked her about the turkeys, and learned that she has been seeing them around for some months.

After Thanksgiving, I curiously did not see the turkeys again for some weeks.  My husband and I joked that they really had been seasonal amusements, and that we were sure to find reindeer in our backyard sometime soon.  We did not.  But, one weekend afternoon, walking down the street, we came upon the turkeys again.  One of our neighbors was feeding them!  We stopped to talk to her.  She had called the humane society, she explained, to make sure she was feeding them something appropriate.  She had named them, Maggie and something else I can’t remember.  They perch on her front porch in the evenings, she said; they must have a nest somewhere nearby.  Turkeys sleep in trees, she explained.  We had no idea.  Others stopped to gawk, or to comment.  We said goodbye, and nice to meet you.

So why am I telling you this mostly ridiculous story about wayward urban animal life?

Oh, you guessed?

Over the course of these months, I began to realize that the turkeys were the only time I stopped to talk to other people on the street around me.  They’re unusual, surprising, and that naturally causes people to stop for a moment; it shakes up their routine or expectations just enough that they notice new things or feel open enough to talk to strangers.

I realized this is why I care about entropy.  I’ve written here and here about the importance of elasticity for economies, ecologies, political empowerment.  But at the heart of anything with a temporal component is its ability to surprise.  And, in turn, to catalyze something new in the people who encounter it.  In some ways this is an aesthetic claim — there is a particular cultural appeal of the visual and sensory appeal of the ephemeral.  But it goes deeper than that.  When established landscapes of behavior and environment are destabilized, people are provoked towards thought, towards reaction, or at least towards coming out of their shells.  Think of the millions of stories that feature a “stranger coming into town” and catalyzing all kinds of latent social transformations simply because the presence of a newcomer allows people to think beyond their expectations.  In a small way, my neighborhood’s turkeys are a bit like this.  We see something we don’t expect, we must remark and confer with someone around us.  In a neighborhood like mine, where everyone keeps to themselves but is generally affable if waved to, an opportunity to make a personal connection must be presented.  Imagine if we had more turkey-like moments in my neighborhood, maybe I’d speak with these neighbors again.

A side note: in retrospect, I find it very instructive that I first shared my turkey sighting over twitter, and via email to my husband.  These are the social networks with which I am more comfortable.  Repeat viewings, and the openness of other strangers to talk, coaxed me into my openness in the “real world.”  Perhaps my experience can point to more systematic implementations of this kind of incremental “surprise” in the future.

First, we saw the rise of Occupy libraries, giving a whole new meaning to public libraries.  Radical librarians in Boston and beyond organized to share books of protest history, local history, economics and more with occupiers and visitors, as described in this New York Times article from the end of October.  By the end of the year, the “micro-library ” phenomenon had entered the broader cultural sphere, profiled in the article “Occupy your Sidewalk” by Amenda Hess for Good Magazine.  This article really made the rounds, and by equating the sidewalk library trend with the Occupy movement it solidified the idea that learning in public can be understood as a kind of political action.  Even when the books being loaned or shared were not expressly political, the idea of appropriating public space for a use for which it was not originally intended — they’re called sidewalks, not sidereads — is understood to be a powerful civic statement.

Perhaps you see that growing consensus in another public learning trend, like micro-libraries, that the Occupy movement has brought into the more mainstream: teach-ins and alternative free universities.  While radical education and collective learning is certainly a long and powerful tradition — as a Boston-area resident I know there are many collectives and organizations experimenting with non-hierarchical, experimental, non-traditional learning for both youth and adults, some of whom are listed on my blogroll — with public occupation came a new opportunity to showcase the fact that meaningful learning can take place outside academic institutions.  Indeed, university responses to occupations around the country — UC Davis’s notorious pepper spray incident and the closure of Harvard Yard to the public, for example — showed us that new ways of sharing learning are often kept out of the powerful instutions of higher learning.  So we saw the development of Occupy Boston’s Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture Series, large programs hosted by The Public School in NYC and more. Like the libraries, this alternative learning challenges normative notions for space and institutional control, and reinserts education and knowledge into its rightful place in civic and urban practice.  These practices show the potential of public space for creativity, experimentation, discourse, and exchange.

Of course, we didn’t just see public learning in occupations and protests.  One of the most incredible learning in public stories of the year, in my opinion, was the Iowa State Fair.  No, I’m not talking about fried butter on a stick.  In August 2011, all of the Republican primary candidates — and some others — spent time on the Soap Box at the Fair, speaking casually and sharing their views with citizens, who could ask them questions (and sometime get a surprising answer).  Now, whatever you might think about the Republicans, their primary race, or whether corporations are people, how many of you have been able to ask a national politician a question, eat fried food on the stick, and watch cattle sales with your family on the same day?  The idea that the serious business of governance can and should be part of community, recreational, heck, FUN events seems to me to be at the heart of how democracy ought to work, but you don’t actually see it happen too often.  I found myself fantasizing about how voting and civics would look if every American knew their vote mattered as much as those Iowa primary voters.  To me, that should have the same urgency as the Occupy protests.

So if that’s where we came in 2011, in 2012 my hopes are that some of these practices are brought into the mainstream.  I don’t mean coopted by corporate interests or watered down by feeble government promises, but truly incorporated into the broader practices of our places and economies.  In 2012 I’m interested to see if the micro-library can also be claimed and incorporated into the sharing economy or collaborative consumption movement.  This was one of the other big breakthroughs of 2011, and if libraries and learning can be included in these practices alongside vacation rentals, time banks, and clothing swaps then I think we’d be able to really revolutionize how people provide for their own learning and build their own approaches to education.

In 2012 I’d also like to see the free university model join forces with the more staid public humanities institutions that do the work of telling the history, economic, scientific and cultural stories that are at the heart of our communities but are still struggling to figure out what the 21st century means for them.  There are so many innovators in this field — the NY Historical Society writes amazing tweets, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum hosts programs that teach about the history of immigration in the neighborhood alongside conversations about immigration in the City today, and the Center for the Future of Museums considers the potential for technological and programming innovations to change museums for the better — but I can’t help feeling that there remains a disconnect between the traditional programming of most public humanities organizations and the clear groundswell of desire for public, non-academic education.  I’d love to see more programs in public places on race, income inequality and protest history, for example.

I’d also like to see more programming committed to civic participation and education, for those of us who don’t live in Iowa or New Hampshire.  While you might object to the idea that a stump speech actually constitutes real learning, I would agree, if the content of the speech was what I thought was doing the teaching.  But rather I’m suggesting here that it’s the idea that you could listen to such a speech without expressly attending a political event that promotes learning: like a library on a street corner or a lecture in a park, a stump speech at a fair also suggests that engagement and the exchange of ideas is something that belongs in our everyday, and in public.  Let’s make that our mission for 2012.