In The Neighborhood

by Peter Lovenheim

  America itself was partly built upon the concept of people living as neighbors. “If the first foundation of New England’s strength and growth was godliness,” writes Alice Morse Earle in Home Life in Colonial Days, “its next was neighborliness . . . The neighborly helpfulness of the New England settlers extended from small to great matters, and entered into every department of town life.” Puritans built their settlements around land shared by all members of the community; in New England villages, to foster social interdependence, homes were located within easy walk of a common meetinghouse. For generations after that, we knew our neighbors. Homes had front porches. People borrowed a cup of sugar. The milkman, egg man, and bread man came daily, exchanging news and helping knit together the fabric of a neighborhood.

  That model of close dwellings and neighborliness—whether in villages, towns, or cities—largely persisted right up until the early part of the twentieth century when, perhaps in reaction to the stresses of industrialization, Americans embraced a new concept in their choice of dwellings: not “social interdependence,” but autonomy. And this new desire for autonomous living was soon reflected in the detached, single-family homes of suburbia. In Suburban Nation, architects and town planners Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck theorize that the roots of the single- family, suburban home can be traced to earlier westward expansion and the “pastoral dream of the autonomous homestead in the countryside . . . to the manse on the agricultural estate, or the cabin in the woods.” The new suburban developments were designed for people to live independently, each in his own self-sufficient home, dependent only on cars and roadways to take him wherever he needed to go.

  While the greatest explosion in suburban growth would occur after World War II—when the GI Bill, federal home loans, and government highway projects would entice young families out of the cities and into new suburban housing—in fact, development of the suburbs began much sooner.

  In the early 1900s in Rochester, New York—as in communities across the country—local and state governments began to lay miles of new roads, sewers, and gas and electric lines. Real estate companies responded by building new subdivisions—new neighborhoods carved from previously rural land. One of these developers was Houston Barnard, a successful engineer and builder. I’ll say more about Houston Barnard, the man, later, but I want to note here that the neighborhood he built, and which still bears his name, was part of that first wave of suburban construction in America.

  Barnard started with a few modest subdivisions on the border of Rochester and Brighton, and then around 1918 began what probably he intended as his crown jewel: in the words of one of his ads, “an important real estate enterprise of high character and residential purpose.” That would later include Sandringham Road, my childhood home, and again my home as an adult.

  Historian and social critic Lewis Mumford, in his book The City in History, surveyed the single-family homes of suburbia, and remarked on what he termed “families in space.”

  “[T]he greater the isolation of the individual household, the more effort it takes to do privately . . . what used to be done in company, often with conversation, song, and the enjoyment of the physical presence of others.”

  WAS my family, growing up in Houston Barnard’s subdivision in the 1950s, a “family in space”? Pretty close to it, as I recall. I don’t remember knowing many families on Sandringham other than those of my two boyhood friends, one of whom was Lou Guzzetta’s son. We three spent time inside each other’s homes, but nearly every other home on our street was, to me, occupied by strangers. I remember playing inside some of those homes when they were under construction, but once the families moved in, I don’t recall meeting any of them.

  Those childhood memories of being so separate from the neighbors gave me pause about moving back to Sandringham, until my parents, as I’ve noted, made an offer we couldn’t refuse. Still, even after I’d moved back and had begun the sleepovers, I sometimes would stop and ask myself what I was doing: if I knew from experience the neighborhood was largely one of “families in space,” why was I so intent on getting to know them?

  I don’t think it was by chance that I conceived the sleepovers only a year or two after my wife and I separated. At some level, I likely was trying to replace the sense of family I had lost with the split. Yet that would not explain another fact: even before my then-wife and I moved back to Sandringham, when we lived in a friendlier, “front-yard” neighborhood in the city, I had actively sought to connect with the neighbors. I recall discovering a city-sponsored “toy library,” and though I could easily afford to buy toys for our young children, I borrowed tricycles and slides, enjoying the sense of community that for me such borrowing represented. I also found a “tool library”—designed, I’m pretty sure, for city residents less able to afford their own drills and power saws than I was, but still I borrowed tools just because I liked the concept. Once, when new neighbors moved in and told us they planned to build a six-foot fence in between our yards, I expressed concern that the fence would cut off our kids’ access to each others’ play spaces. In response, we agreed on a “mediated” fence: one that was six feet high between the houses but then sloped down to three feet high in the back and inset with a gate so the kids could see into each others’ yards and easily move back and forth between both houses. Another time, when a neighbor and I were each growing tomatoes on either side of a chain-link fence, I proposed running my drip irritation hoses under the fence to water both crops at once, in exchange for a small plot in his garden where I could put some extra plants. I liked these arrangements; they made me feel connected to the people around me.

  Some of my motivation may have just been leftover communitarian feelings from the 1960s—I’d come of age in the ’60s and certainly had absorbed some of that period’s notions of community. At another level, though, I may have been after something deeper: as a young child, coming in birth order nearly a decade after my oldest sibling, I didn’t quite feel a full part of the family. Perhaps, in whatever neighborhood I found myself, I was always searching for that sense of belonging.

  These thoughts were not conscious, however, when I began the sleepovers, and it took the murder-suicide to shock me into going out and deliberately meeting the neighbors. Nor had I thought deeply at that point about what defines a neighborhood, and whether a place where no one comes to the aid of an old woman crawling across the street deserves to be called one. I just knew I wanted to get to know the people nearby.

  THE first thing I noticed when I visited Grace Field’s apartment was her collection of souvenir spoons: hundreds of little spoons were laid out in fan shapes on coffee tables and end tables, and displayed in boxes hung on the walls. She had many more in storage, she said.

  Grace lived alone. One brother lived in Tennessee and another had died seven years earlier. Nearly all of her friends had died, too.

  We sat facing each other in big armchairs in the small, carpeted living room. Up close, Grace looked even more fragile and tinier than when I saw her on the street. “I used to be five- two,” she said. “Now I’m five even—a little osteoporosis.” Her weight, which had long been about 92, had dropped to 85. She had a slight hump on her back. She had short, curly white hair, and her face was thin. She wore red lipstick and often smiled gently as she spoke.

  “Were you one of the little boys I used to see in your neighborhood?” she asked. “I remember one little boy came along once on his three-wheeler and said to me, ‘Your dress is pretty.’ Years later I was wearing the same dress and that boy—of course, he was older by then—came up to me again and said, ‘I like your dress.’ ”

  I remembered, as a boy, once saying hi to Grace. Maybe I’d also said something about her dress. I couldn’t remember, but I hoped I had said it.

  That morning in the apartment, Grace had on a simple black housedress; as we spoke, her gnarled fingers played at the large buttons up the front. She wore flat shoes and thick, tan stockings rolled below the knee
.

  Which house on Sandringham did I live in? Grace asked. I said I lived about halfway down the street where two split-level ranch houses with circular driveways sat side by side. They looked so similar in design, and both were fronted in light-colored brick, that visitors often confused them until I had the brick on mine painted over in a taupe color.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “I know those two houses. I like the other one better. I could never understand why you’d paint over the brick.”

  Grace said she began walking in the summer of 1960, a fact I seized on for a theory as to why she had started walking in the first place: in 1955, after Dwight Eisenhower’s heart attack, his personal physician, Dr. Paul Dudley White, had urged Americans to get more exercise, such as biking and brisk walks. Wasn’t that why Grace had started walking?

  “No,” she said, “I didn’t walk for exercise. I did it more to let off steam, sort of. I guess I just had energy to work off. It became a compulsion, really.”

  Grace Field was born in Binghamton, New York, in 1914. Later, she and her family moved to Rochester, where her father ran a successful photo supply business. She grew up in a city neighborhood until age fourteen, when the family moved to Brighton. At the Eastman School of Music in Rochester she studied harp and piano, and then, in her twenties, moved to Manhattan to study harp at the Julliard School. From a box of old papers, she pulled out a card with the photo of a young, attractive, dark-haired woman. “Miss Grace Field, Harp and Celtic Harp, Available for Solo & Ensemble Work, Churches- Clubs-Private Gatherings.” It listed a phone number and address on Manhattan’s East Side.

  “I just sold it a couple of years ago,” Grace said when I asked if she still had a harp. She said she couldn’t find any new music and got bored playing the same pieces over and over again. Same thing with her piano. She sold that, too.

  Against the wall near where we were seated was a long wooden table where the piano had been. The table was covered with spoons, and also with angel figurines, and tiny harps carved from wood.

  When she lived in New York City, Grace had a boyfriend, a young man who had wanted to study Irish harp. Later, he asked her to marry him, but she declined his proposal when she learned that his ninety-year-old mother would have to live with them.

  Since then, Grace had lived alone. “I’m just an old maid,” she said with a sad laugh.

  After eighteen years in New York, Grace returned to Rochester, took a job at the library, and moved into a modest home on a little street in Brighton called School House Lane.

  She chose Sandringham and nearby streets to walk on because of their beauty. “I admired the homes, and it’s also shady,” she explained. “The heat bothers me. But in your neighborhood I can almost walk the whole way in the shade.” The trees along Sandringham form a canopy over the sidewalk that offers nearly continuous shade. In a light rain, you could walk a good part of the way without even getting wet.

  Grace would drive to a corner near Sandringham, then walk up and down the street and around the neighborhood for about a half an hour. At a brisk pace of about four miles an hour, she’d cover about two miles.

  “I saw all kinds of things,” she said, remembering some of the highlights of her years of walking. She remembers the time in the 1960s when a judge’s house at the corner of Sandringham was bombed, and when people marched outside the home of a doctor who did abortions with signs that said, THIS MAN MURDERS BABIES.

  And she remembers the murder-suicide at the Willses’ house. “I heard it on the news and I thought, ‘Oh, my. I pass that house all the time.’ I believe the house was empty for a while after that.”

  In four decades of walking, had she gotten to know many of the people who live on Sandringham?

  “No, not many,” she said. “In the early days I made a friendly acquaintance with one couple, but then they died off and the new generation are not so interested in knowing an old lady.”

  She added, “There is a doctor who lives over there near you. I believe his name is Guzzetta. I became acquainted with him walking his dog, Heidi. I have a niece also named Heidi. He’s a nice man. He lost his wife a few years back.

  “I also became acquainted with the mailman,” she continued. “One day I dropped my purse getting out of my car and the mailman—he was new at the time—picked it up for me.”

  I wanted to know what Grace meant when she said the reason she walked was to “let off steam.”

  What did she think about while she walked?

  “A lot of time I was just admiring the homes,” she said. “Or sometimes I’d play games with myself, like counting trees, counting how many steps I’d take in a minute, or counting the number of steps between lampposts. I used to apply music to my walking, too. I used to walk in different time signatures.”

  I asked Grace to show me how she walked in time signatures. She got up and in slow, careful steps made her way across the beige-carpeted floor to an open area in the middle of the room. Then she demonstrated how she would walk in 2/4 time—a straightforward stride toward the door, one foot and then the other; then 3/4 time—a kind of forward waltz back to me.

  “I’d walk in triplets, too,” she said, and she moved toward the door in a kind of stuttering step, her right foot moving out to the side with accents on alternating feet.

  “I remember that!” I nearly shouted, suddenly recalling as a boy seeing her walk in front of my house with that unusual step.

  Grace was limping again and returned to her chair.

  When I asked how she coped with loneliness, Grace answered, “I have some good memories,” and mentioned, as an example, a time in New York City when she drove with friends across the Brooklyn Bridge in an open convertible, holding her harp in the backseat. “People were shouting and waving at us,” she recalled, smiling.

  What would she miss if she had to give up walking? I asked.

  “I’d miss walking,” she said, “and the beauty of your neighborhood.”

  I wondered if Grace had ever wished that she herself had lived on Sandringham. “No,” she said without hesitation. “I liked my little house with my parents, and then my other little house on School House Lane. I knew all my neighbors. Every time someone moved in, they’d have a big party to welcome them. Your neighborhood is lovely, but I never see people in their front yards, and they don’t have front porches. When I was young, everyone would sit out on their porches and people would walk by and visit.”

  WHEN I said good-bye to Grace, we hugged at her apartment door. As I held her, I was surprised just how little there was of her.

  It made me sad to think that Grace Field had walked through my neighborhood nearly every day for more than forty years, counting lampposts and walking in triplets, yet aside from perhaps one couple who had long since passed on, none of us had gotten to know her. Put another way: Grace had, in effect, invited all of us to be her neighbor, but none of us had. Maybe she could have given some child on our street piano or harp lessons, or taught us how to keep fit long before it was fashionable. None of that happened, though, and now it was very close to too late.

  Whether I said “Hi” one day and complimented Grace Field on her dress or not, still I had grown up on that street and mostly ignored her. Even as an adult, I ignored her. I saw Grace. I spoke about her. But I didn’t speak to her.

  If Renan Wills and her family had left a light footprint in our neighborhood, then Grace Field, despite having walked past our homes day after day for more than forty years—that’s nearly fifteen thousand times—had left virtually no footprint, until now.

  My thank-you note to Grace for letting me visit, and her note to me, crossed in the mail. Her card, with yellow butterflies on the front, thanked me for coming over to talk with her. She enclosed a gift: a cloth bookmark she’d woven by hand, an intricate design in brown and white.

  I wish we’d better woven Grace into our neighborhood when we had the chance.

  4

  The Top of Their Games

  ON the
same day Bob Wills shot his wife and himself, a young Rochester couple, vacationing in the Cayman Islands, made an offer to buy a house on Sandringham Road. “I called my sister the next day to tell her we’d faxed in the offer,” recalled Deb O’Dell. “That’s when she gave us the news. Later, when we were back in town and told people we were moving to Sandringham, they all said, ‘Oh, are you buying that house?’ They thought we were buying the Willses’ house. It didn’t bother us, though.”

  The house that Deb and Dave O’Dell bought is the house next to mine, on the other side of me from Lou Guzzetta. At the time I approached them, the O’Dells had been married just four years, and Deb, thirty-two, was Sandringham’s youngest homeowner.

  My contact with the O’Dells, since they had moved in about a year earlier, had been brief but pleasant. They did some of their own yard work, and on nice days when we both happened to be outside, we would sometimes chat over the fence. So calling Deb on a Sunday to see if I could stop by to talk about a “new writing project,” as I termed it, was not difficult. She invited me over that same afternoon.

  THE O’Dells’ home, built in 1937, was one of the stately older houses on the street. Constructed of red brick, it was modeled after French country estates. It had a steeply pitched, pavilion roof covered in slate shingles. The interior featured hardwood floors and French doors. My house, in comparison—with its ranch-style horizontal lines and plain brick façade—seemed bland.

  At 4 p.m., I walked next door to visit with Deb. She welcomed me in and showed me to the kitchen, where we sat at the breakfast table. Deb was petite, with shoulder-length brown hair and a wholesome look. Nearby, a beautifully groomed golden retriever—named Cayman, after the island where Deb and Dave vacation—was eager to play. I’m writing a book about how people live as neighbors, I told Deb, as I gave her a hard-cover copy of my previous book. I asked about her experience since moving into her new home. She said things had mostly gone well. She said she hadn’t met many of the neighbors and would like to, but on the other hand, she and Dave didn’t have a lot of free time. They were both kept busy with work—each had an active career in business—decorating the house, and sports. In the winters they played volleyball and paddle tennis, and in the summers, Deb enjoyed golf at the country club. As well, they each had family in town. In the warmer months, they liked to be away every weekend at a Finger Lakes cottage about thirty miles south of Rochester owned by Dave’s family.