Posted on 12/27/2008 5:53:20 AM PST by VU4G10
Written by Goffin and King about Pleasant Valley Way, which runs through the West Orange, NJ neighborhood they once called home.
I've been nice about people bashing cities, but this is also an overgeneralization. And some of us LIKE very old houses. They have character (and around here are built better). There's a huge movement here of people buying total dumps and completely renovating them. It takes years, but worth it in the end. There are a number of new housing tracts now in the city where the old stock was neglected by landlords and subsequently destroyed by tenants and the buildings were meticulously taken apart for salvaged brick and various other features that ended up in the antique shops on Cherokee Street. It would be considered prejudiced if I elaborated on that one.
And not all places are high crime. It's not hard to avoid it - drive a not fancy or flashy car, leave nothing that looks valuable in it and put plate guards over your license places and nothing's going to happen. When my car was broken into, the bag that was stolen contained a copy of St. Augustine's Confessions. The stickers have been stolen off my plates twice. So, I get single year stickers now, instead of two year. Some people would tell me to avoid the neighborhood, but as that is where the Cathedral is - I don't think so.
I just love the city. I know on this board that makes me weird, but I don't care. Aside from that, the city of St. Louis is making a comeback and it's a beautiful thing to watch.
BTW: For a great portrait of a smug suburbanite who loses everything he lived for, check out the film version of Cheever's "The Swimmer" with Burt Lancaster. One of my favorite movies of all time.
Or in other words, people have different tastes which are reflected in where they choose to live. Why that requires raving about others’ options, I do not know.
This is the key, as always, with liberals--the intense need to intrude into other people's affairs and control them. The thought of all those...those...well those Unworthy bourgeois Amerikans living their lives, driving their cars, and enjoying their freedoms without so much as a bow to their intellectual superiors--well it just isn't right.
There is plenty to do in our close-in Atlanta suburb. We could keep you busy from morning til night, no matter what you enjoy.
If you hang around here, though, it will probably involve amateur radios, cars, or large enthusiastic dogs and dead mallards. Although if you want to play polo, I can get you a mount.
You sound just like the Charlotte City Council! ;-).
Another Pleasant Valley Sunday
Charcoal burning everywhere.
“You try living in an apartment with nine children, IF you can get anyone to rent you one. Aesthetes can vomit themselves to death, for all I care.”
exactly.
We aren’t even part of this debate.
We are rural.
Old converted farmhouse right smack in the middle of dairy farm country.
On top of a steep hill in the middle of the boonies.
Cornfield in front of us, cornfield behind us.
Room to run and explore the woods.
. . . yeah, I know East isn't St. Louis, but it was too good to waste.
I've lived in the city, nothing against folks who like it, but I prefer what somebody up thread called 'small acreage'.
ha ha.
Such a place may be okay for some, and I say God bless them, but give me the city any day.
Ditto. In the city, there's a much better chance of finding a church with an intact organ, too.
North Witherspoon, by Conti's and the hospital? Its now a (very small) Guatemalan neighborhood, surrounded by stereotypical Princetonians.
Grew up in an older suburb (that actually had a charming main street with independent businesses, something lacking these days in Manhattan) on Long Island, then lived for a short while in McMansionland (Dix Hills) followed by South Florida. In adulthood, have lived in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Chicago (north and south sides), and downtown Seattle. Currently living in Lawrenceville, NJ, across the street from a colonial Church that served as an ambush point when the Brits followed Gen. Washington to Princeton three miles up the road.
Now that you have my summary, I guess you can say that I have seen it all: Leave-it-to-Beaver bliss (Long Island), steaming pile of multiethnic sprawl (South Florida), urban lowlife (the Bronx), the land that time forgot (Bay Ridge, Brooklyn), neourbanite bland smugness (Seattle) and pseudourbanite smugness (Lawrenceville/Princeton). I guess I need to move out to a dairyfarm to complete the cycle.
Art galleries? 72-acre Botanical Gardens? Major League baseball? NHL? The Symphony? Good antique shops?
It all depends on what you are interested in doing.
Well, it’s odd that I mentioned old houses and crime, and you pointed out that your place of residence has ... old houses and crime. Yes, it’s true that some people make restoring old houses their life’s occupation. That’s fine for them. I loved watching them on HGTV when we had cable. (We considered buying a big old 1902 place in the county seat, but decided we did not want to make the house our life’s project.) And some choose to tolerate higher crime rates in return for what they consider reasonable tradeoffs, while others don’t consider that cost worth the benefits.
In a country that’s still freer than average, we can all make these decisions for ourselves. So the reason to argue about it is ... avoiding the dishing and laundry we should be doing?
In LA nobody walks any more than the distance from their car to a restaurant. In NYC (which I know very well), everyone likes to walk around their respective neighborhoods, especially in Manhattan and Brooklyn where the apartments are small.
The suburbs are about families. The amoral narcissists in Hollywood can’t hold a family together. They hate the people who can.
We have woods here, too, right in the middle of bland suburbanity. The kids are always getting poison ivy and bringing in icky animals.
I've lived in a variety of places, too, and I think it depends on what you're doing at the time. When we were young marrieds, a row house or an apartment was just fine. Kids need room to spread out and a safe place to play. Now that the kids are almost grown we're thinking of small acreage, enough for dogs and a horse or two (and a rifle range) but small enough to keep up well.
Uh, calling East St. Louis in its current state a city is an insult to cities. There are some pockets that are pristine over there. I mean beautiful streets with brickwork that just isn’t done anymore. But, the Ambassador Hotel, a 14 story building, has a tree growing out of the roof. Decades ago, the manhole covers disappeared. The neighborhood where my mother’s extended family lived is a bunch of holes in the ground. And the sad thing is, what put it in its current state was a bunch of crooked democratic politicians in the 40’s and 50’s who ripped the place off. No one paid attention.
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