City Safari: At Home With The New Isolationists
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Silent streets.
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Wed, Apr 22, 2020
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At night the streets in my neighborhood are quiet. Occasionally one sees a random walker, a couple walking a dog, a homeless person with knapsack or a drug-selling kid on a bicycle asking passersby, "What’s up tonight?”
These cool April nights are perfect for walks around the neighborhood but few people seem to be taking advantage of it. Walk among the row homes here and you’ll see houses ‘buttoned up’ like tight Victorian collars. But self-isolation—families barricaded inside their homes—breeds another kind of isolation: psychological estrangement.
Imagine couples in bad marriages having to isolate together, having no place to run when one spouse breaks the rules of civility. Gone are the conventional escape routes-- bars, cafes, bookstores—so a quick walk around the block will have to suffice. One can always go to the local Rite Aid and walk the aisles but that is hardly a soothing compensation. Visiting a friend who lives nearby would be your best bet, but not if that friend lives in a Center City condo.
I feel for my friends who live in high-rise Center City condos. That’s because the fear generated by this plague has caused most condo conglomerates to forbid residents from having outside guests. Some condo establishments, like the Academy House, have even instituted the draconian measure of "forbidding” in-house residents from socializing with other residents in the building. This far-reaching abuse of power apparently has met with little or no resistance from residents. One would hope, of course, that at least a minority of residents would stand up to the new rules, especially considering the money that these people paid to live there.
Once considered the apex of Center City living, these swanky high-rise condos, many of which have been profiled in Philadelphia Styleand Philadelphia Magazine, have now been turned into high-rise prisons.
When this plague winds down, I would hope that smart Center City condo owners rethink their living spaces. After all, when you have many people living in a single building, you get rules conjured up by a Board of Directors who often don’t know when to stop making new rules on top of rules until, Bingo, they tap into authoritarian measures in the name of safety.
Making rules for the "good of all” rarely means "good,” period.
How much better are those Center City residents who own real houses instead of condos.
Plague or no plague, real homeowners can write their own rules. They can also have guests at any time. Their guests don’t have to deal with inquisitive desk clerks who ask for names, date and serial number. There’s no waiting for elevators, no citations for residential "misbehavior.”
More importantly, when you eliminate a person’s freedom by denying them access to guests, you are nothing better than a housing project in China.
Before the plague, the high-rise condo hype about fantastic views, excellent security and the convenience of Center City living held considerable weight, but this plague changes that.
As has been proven in New York City, viruses like the present plague tend to hit congested cities in the worst way. New York is where people live on top of one another. It’s where there’s barely room to pass anyone on crowded sidewalks. It’s where people breathe on you in elevators.
After this plague subsides, there could be a move to smaller cities or to relatively unpopulated states. Urban high culture—museums, lectures, opera, concerts, galleries and theater, etc., may be traded for safety in remote regions or the mountains.
Another thing this pandemic is doing is causing many of us to look on our neighbor-- and in some cases our friends-- as walking disease vectors. For many of us, when someone walks by us on the street, the tendency is to think the worst.
In my neighborhood there are many new 300k modern utility houses that appeal to millennial types. These homes resemble Bauhaus warehouses and are often out of scale with the rest of the neighborhood homes. These new structures generally have cheap front staircase railings that rattle in the wind, and a few of them under construction have been known to fall down during great windstorms.
The pandemic has raised fear and paranoia to new levels.
Say you are walking with a friend. Say you just came from the supermarket and you are walking down a narrow street where you come upon one of these new 300k homes. Imagine that the shopping bags you are carrying need rearranging. You put the bags on the stoop of the house in question. Just for a minute, mind you, just until you get the contents of the bags rearranged.
As a Philadelphia row house owner for some time, I’ve had countless passers-by use my stoop to tie their shoelaces, catch their breath, rewrap their winter carves in freezing weather. This never bothered me. As long as these stoop visitors don’t camp there forever, pitch a tent, or begin to eat a multi-course Chinese dinner (this did occur on my stoop when I first moved to the neighborhood), I’m fine with it.
The plague that is causing many of us to look at our fellow human beings as disease vectors, is now working to do the worst psychological damage: the disruption of neighborhoods and communities in the name of public safety. It is even affecting eye contact, as if a virus could somehow jump from eyeball to eyeball via a passing glance.
Let’s return to the grocery bags. Imagine you are rearranging the items in the bags then imagine that just before you finish the task, the homeowner appears and says to you, "Pardon me, but would you mind taking your task elsewhere, away from my steps. Thank you so much.” (Then she slams the door).
The person with the grocery bags happened to me.
My first reaction was to immediately categorize the woman’s words as plague-driven paranoia and fear, unsubstantiated by science because I was wearing a mask and was obviously no threat.
There was some consolation in the fact that I don’t think she was a Philadelphian, She was a ‘move-in’ from another state, probably New York, and her speaking manner was out of keeping with a true Philadelphian, meaning that "true” Philadelphians seem to have an innate understanding of row house stoop protocol, which is to never overstay a momentary "visit.”
In conclusion, let me mention the End the Lockdown movement. The End the Lockdown movement is composed of mostly conservatives protesting the overreaching hands of government—the so-called Nanny State-- into all areas of our lives. Antifa activist brigades (the original mask wearers) have all but vanished from the urban scene, replaced by a new set of activists, conservatives protesting both reasonable and unreasonable lockdown restrictions, taking to the streets like the Vietnam War protestors, while old white liberals sit at home and obey like hypnotized Stepford Wives.
Who would have thought!
Like it or not, the conservative protesters are really part of a necessary checks and balance system, on guard against crazy mayors like Bill De Blasio of New York who has gone to extremes when he urged New Yorkers to snitch on fellow New Yorkers who break social distancing rules.
