Growing up in the big city
The NYTimes ran a bunch of letters in response to the article about childless cities. One of them wrote:
"As someone who lived in San Francisco with two small boys, I think I know why there are few children in that city: It just isn’t a great place to be a kid.
My oldest son couldn’t learn to ride his bike on the hilly and congested streets. We didn’t have a backyard. And our neighborhood was barren on Halloween. (We drove to a friend’s suburban neighborhood to trick-or-treat)."
I grew up in the heart of Greenwich Village. It was an amazing place to be on Halloween (the parade was over the top even then, and a 30 story apartment building is heaven for trick-or-treating), but overall it wasn’t a great place to be a small child (or to be the parent of a small child). It’s true that someone always had to be with me if I wanted to go out to play, and I didn’t learn to ride a bike until I was an adult.
But it was a terrific place to be a teenager, because you could get anywhere without a car. I started taking the subway to school in 7th grade. I totally took for granted a diversity of people, of languages, of foods, of experiences. Firefighters and drag queens were equally likely to be waiting on line in front of me at the supermarket. And yet it was also a real community, where the butcher would have my parents’ order out for me without my saying my name.
One summer at camp, a kid made fun of me because I called McDonald’s "McDonald’s" rather than "Micky D’s" or "the Golden Arches." I thought he was an idiot. McDonald’s just wasn’t important enough in my life to warrant a nickname. Instead, I could make a passionate argument for why the Ray’s across the street from Jefferson Market library was the only one worth going to (inch-thick layers of toppings) and could go out to dinner in Chinatown with my Chinese-American boyfriend’s family without totally humiliating myself.
I have nothing against backyards. I enjoy puttering around trying to grow tomatoes in our postage stamp of a backyard, and am sometimes envious of my friends who have yards big enough for swingsets or impromptu t-ball games. But to say that San Francisco or New York is a bad place to be a kid because you won’t have a backyard displays an awfully limited view of childhood.
March 28th, 2005 at 8:59 pm
I lived eight years in Chicago and Philly, and gave cities a resounding “Meh.” I moved to Vancouver and was a convert within a year. It definitely depends on the city. There are a lot of kids here, and more significantly, a lot for kids to DO.
I have no problem with the abscence of a backyard. The park a block away is our backyard, not to mention the aquarium and the community centre. Any gardening I get a hankering for is handled adequately by herbs on the balcony. I think of backyard, I think of WORK.
March 28th, 2005 at 9:44 pm
Amen.
March 29th, 2005 at 8:02 am
What gets me about this whole debate is how often I run into or read comments by people who have lived their whole lives in suburbs yet think they know that cities are not good places to raise kids. They think they know that suburbs are the only good places for families.
As someone who grew up in a typical suburb, and who used to think that exact same way — until I actually lived in a city — what I find is that those beliefs about cities are more a reflection of an anti-city perspective of mainstream media, especially television, which idealizes the suburbs as clean and healthy and all those wonderful things, while at the same time demonizing cities as dirty and dangerous and all those bad things.
And of course that ignores all the bad things about suburbs and all the good things about cities.
Thanks for your perspective, sounds like you had an absolutely wonderful childhood growing up in the heart of NYC!
March 29th, 2005 at 9:28 am
I love your comment about McDonald’s. My nieces and nephews, who all live in the suburbs in other states, are most familiar with fast food. Living just outside of DC, my 19 month old has been exposed to lebanese, mexican, thai, vietnamese, korean and american cooking and loves it all.
March 29th, 2005 at 11:07 am
This weekend we toured a cohousing community:
http://www.cambridgecohousing.org/
and that seems to me to be a neat compromise. You have an apartment complex, all peopled by people who know each other and chose to join the community. There is lots of trust, and shared common spaces like play rooms, a rec room, playground equipment, fitness center, wood shop, garden, etc. There are many families with kids of similar ages, and they play together and have pretty much free run of the grounds. This seems to me to provide many of the advantages of a suburban neighborhood. But this apartment complex is an urban setting. It’s 10 minutes walk from the closest subway station. From there, it’s 15 minutes or so to Downtown Boston or to museums. It’s in Cambridge, and there are lots of great restaurants not far away, with lots of different cuisines.
I think that if I were to live somewhere like this, I’d prefer it to be more urban, more like this community:
http://www.swansway.com/
But I think a cohousing community seems like a nice compromise between providing little kids lots of safe space to run around and make friends, and providing teenagers and adults with interesting cultural and social opportunities. There’s still plenty of privacy; each unit within the community is an autonomous apartment or condo, and you could just ignore the rest of the community if you wished to.
March 29th, 2005 at 4:09 pm
I grew up on 36th Street and absolutely agree with your comments. I was going to stores within a block or two of my house by third grade and riding two buses to school by sixth (we had moved uptown by then) — and my parents never had to worry about drinking and driving. Having been a parent of small ones in NYC in the mid 90s before moving to college town, my sense is that raising kids in the city can be stressful for the _parents_, but it’s great for the kids.
March 29th, 2005 at 5:59 pm
Gotta disagree with you, the best Rays’s was two blocks north of Washington Square Park. Your post has made me homesick.
March 29th, 2005 at 8:45 pm
I grew up in Queens. I went to college in New England. I said to one of the first girls I met at college: “Cool sandals – where’d you get them?” She looked at me like I had 8 heads and said “they’re BIRKENSTOCKS.”
Oh.
Didn’t have them in Queens. But that’s about the only thing I think I missed growing up.
March 29th, 2005 at 11:43 pm
Gah, cohousing sounds to me too much like my grandparents’ condo complex. An entire Queens neighborhood heads south. Eternal camp, with more home medical equipment as you go. They loved it, though. I think I’d be climbing the walls. I _like_ not knowing who else lives here. And even here, in a big-10 college town with rapid turnover, I’m finding it’s a little…small, after 10 years. Was in NYC recently and found myself staring at people _friendly-like_ because they looked familiar and I assumed I knew them. Oh boy.
Otoh, it sure makes screening tenants easier. Girl says she works at Fred’s Hardware? You just go down and see Fred and say, “Hey Fred, this Gwen, she pretty good? Yeah? Steady? Mm. Met her boyfriend?”
See, you’d be climbing the walls too.
March 30th, 2005 at 11:59 am
I also wonder how much “diversity” one gets in co-housing. You end up with like-minded people with probably very little variance in political ideas, lifestyle, or even race. I also can’t imagine a lot of single people or retired people voluntarily living in an environment like this.
March 30th, 2005 at 12:34 pm
Co-housing looks great, I hope to join one someday.
Let me point out another big advantage of urban life: if you work in the big city, like most suburbanites still do, your commute is a lot shorter if you also live in the city. That means more time you can spend with your kids — and that is probably the best single thing you can do for them.
March 30th, 2005 at 5:08 pm
More thoughts on co-housing —
It might be claustrophobic, but at this point in my life, I’d really like to be connected to people around me, and I’d like the same for my kids. I spent my elementary school years living in a teeny tiny village in Germany, going to school on an army base. The kids in my school usually moved away after 6 months to a year. My boyfriend grew up in a city in Israel, but he lived in a cohesive neighborhood, full of young families, in apartments that circled a park with a kindergarten in it. He still has friends that we are in regular contact with from elementary school and high school. It’s fun to look at the baby pictures, and recognize our friends among the little kids’ faces. I want to give my children close friendships like that. I want them to be able to run around in a safe place without having all of their play time tightly scheduled or having a parent hovering at all times (age appropriately, of course). But I also have really grown to appreciate living in a city, and I want my kids to have access to the history and the public resources that come from living in a city.
I think the amount of diversity in cohousing differs a lot. It’s a little more expensive, I think, then living on your own, because you have to pay for a share of the common spaces as well, and that will change the demographics. There’s a lot of talk about subsidies and encouraging minorities to join, etc, on the cohousing websites to try to increase the amount of diversity. But regardless of how diverse a cohousing community is, I don’t think a kid raised in an urban cohousing community would be sheltered from diversity. Maybe when they’re little; but they’d go to school and go to museums and restaurants and other places where there would be more diversity.
I was actually very surprised by the number of retired people in the Cambridge Cohousing Community. The woman who gave us our tour was older, with grown children, and the community is only 7 years old. She said they have trouble attracting young families, because of the urban environs. I think it makes a lot of sense to live in such a community when you’re older, especially if you’re not working, or are single/divorced/widowed. It’s another way to connect to people. And it’s a support network when things go badly.
March 31st, 2005 at 6:10 am
I live in an inner city suburb right now (with two small children and a postage stamp backyard) and I love it and desperately want to stay. The (few) people in the area who’ve raised children the whole way say that the hardest age is 5-10 (which resonates with your experience as a teenager) – they need a big space and can’t go places by themselves.
We (with our two small children) get a huge amount out of being inner city at the moment – excursions to museums, local landmarks, great landmarks. And my commute is 20 minutes.