The Death and Life of Public Space in Great American Cities
“When I arrived in Chicago, one of the first things that caught my attention was the absence of life out on the streets,” observed author José Angel N., who came to the city from Mexico in the late 1990s. “Life in the United States, I would soon learn, is lived indoors.” This observation about Americans’ everyday use of public spaces and private places was by no means distinctive to the place or the person. Frank Trejo, a longtime Dallas journalist covering Spanish-speaking immigrants in that city, agreed. “One of the things that people say to me is that there’s a real absence of public life. That they miss having everybody hanging out in front of their houses, walking down the street, hanging out in the plaza.” Latin American immigrants have often expressed variations on this same basic theme: that compared to their home countries, people in the United States make much less use of sidewalks, yards, parks, plazas, and similar gathering places, preferring to spend more of their time at home in private (Figure 1)
Figure 1. The Little Village Arch, 26th Street, Chicago, 2011. A project envisioned in 1983 and completed four years later by the Chamber of Commerce, the United Latin American Businessmen, and the City of Chicago, the Spanish Colonial-style structure exemplified the transplantation and adaptation of Latin American spatial culture into U.S. cities. Photograph by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz.
The people of Anglo-America had been saying much the same thing for decades. Books like Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man (1977), Alan Ehrenhalt’s The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtue of Community in America (1995), and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000) offered well-grounded critiques of the decline of a public-spirited populace going out into their communities and spending time with their fellow Americans. These and many other studies showed that middle-class Americans were gradually moving away from activities that they had enjoyed together in public places and instead pursuing them in private: movie palaces lost out to home theaters, municipal natatoriums gave way to backyard pools.
But the most famous example of popular concern about public space—the incident which more than any other got people thinking about the sidewalks of their neighborhoods and the families who lived around them—came even earlier. It involved a young New Yorker named Kitty Genovese. Late in the winter of 1964, the 28-year-old was knifed to death on the street near her home in Kew Gardens, a middle-class neighborhood in Queens. Shortly thereafter, the New York Times published a shocking (and, it later emerged, somewhat exaggerated) report of the crime under the headline, “Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police.” The story detailed investigative records indicating that many people had heard the young woman’s screams but figured that somebody else would take care of whatever the problem was. “Thirty people must have called the police already,” one woman who lived near the scene of the crime had said to her husband when he thought of picking up the phone. Nobody had, though. The most telling words from the tragic episode came from the victim’s upstairs neighbor, a shy man who admitted to hearing the sounds of the attack but contacted law enforcement only later. “I didn’t want to get involved,” he lamely explained.
The story set off a round of soul-searching across the city and nation. People were shocked by the apparent lack of interest of Genovese’s neighbors, and expressed disbelief that so many people could have done nothing while a woman was being murdered on their very street. It fed the growing sense that in the contemporary United States, at least in the big city, people just didn’t care about each other. Newspaper commentators and public officials called for a reckoning with what this meant for society, and how it explained why the streets weren’t safe anymore. And most broadly, people wondered what had been lost of the neighborly feeling they believed had existed not so long ago but was now giving way to people who slammed their front doors against their fellow citizens in the streets. The Kitty Genovese incident became the inspiration for more than a half-century of books, plays, movies, television episodes, popular songs, and other cultural forms, all touching on the same basic issue: Whatever happened to the days when neighbors took care of each other?
Even as people in the United States worried about the abandonment of the public realm, however, help was arriving from the rest of the world, especially the Americas. Alongside immigrants from other regions, who began to arrive in greater numbers after the U.S. relaxed restrictions on immigration in 1965, Latinos helped revitalize street life and public space in numerous U.S. cities, making the sidewalks not just more vibrant, but also safer. They ameliorated some of the key symptoms of the urban crisis, most notably by helping reduce the rate of crime: in cities where Latino populations have soared over the past thirty years, violent and property crime have dropped dramatically, as research by Harvard criminologist Robert Sampson and others have demonstrated.
Figure 2. Oak Cliff, Dallas, 2013. Latino entrepreneurs revitalized neighborhood economies by opening shops, offices, restaurants, and other businesses in small storefronts left vacant by English-speaking proprietors who had been driven out by big-box corporate retailers or moved to suburban malls. Photograph by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz.
The Latinization of U.S. cities, in other words, was not just a question of numbers; it involved much more than simply the arrival of millions of people in metropolitan areas. Equally important was the distinctive urban culture of the newcomers—the way they walked, dwelled, shopped, and socialized. It was the combination of these quantitative and qualitative factors that made them so transformative.
Latino urbanism—the everyday modes of city-dwelling that Latin American immigrants and their descendants created in the United States—was a hybrid form with origins in their home countries. Immigrants imported a number of elements of Hispanic spatial culture and adapted them for use in the United States, creating a new urbanism that combined key features from across the Americas. This was the case whether they were freshly arrived from Latin America or whether, as in the Southwest, their ancestors had been on what is now U.S. territory for centuries or millennia. They were by no means the only new group of people to leave their stamp on the late twentieth-century U.S. cityscape; newcomers from many other parts of the world also brought their own day-to-day spatial practices. But because Latin American immigration involved 25 million people from a culturally coherent region of nineteen different countries it was Latino urbanism that became the most expansive version of immigrant space in U.S. cities.
“Latinos helped revitalize street life and public space in numerous U.S. cities, making the sidewalks not just more vibrant, but also safer”
The same years that saw rising concern about the loss of the public sphere in the United States also saw the emergence of a by now-familiar movement of citizens, activists, urbanists, and architects who saw midcentury city planning and suburban land development as key causes of the abandonment of public places—and who hoped that better planning ideas could help restore them. Jane Jacobs was, of course, the most famous of them, and her 1961 magnum opus The Death and Life of Great American Cities decried mainstream city planning—with its emphasis on demolishing older areas and systematically rebuilding them in modernist styles with their large scale and often severe geometry—and instead held up traditional, small-scale neighborhoods that were intended for pedestrians and fostered daily contact among neighborhood people.
Decades later, these ideas inspired the New Urbanism and its manifesto that called for reinvestment in city and town centers, the construction of neighborhoods built around walking and public transportation, and an end to public policies that subsidized suburbanization and sprawl. These and other changes, they maintained, would help revitalize public life and encourage shared efforts and consensual solutions for metropolitan problems.
But even as these activists—well known to urbanists and other scholars of the American landscape—were gearing up and becoming more influential in design, planning, cultural landscape studies, cultural resource management, and allied fields—Latinas and Latinos were, in a less programmatic but very practical and efficacious way, creating a new kind of urbanism of their own. It would be many years before people would start using the term “Latino urbanism,” but its key elements were developing rapidly, though mostly unnoticed beyond immigrant neighborhoods.
Figure 3. Three homescapes in Little Village, 2011. In an era when many middle-class Americans had retreated to the privacy of their backyards, many U.S. Latinos created enclosed front yards where children could safely play, supervised by adults who would chat with friends and neighbors and keep an eye on the block. Spaces like these even got their own Spanglish name: “la yarda.” Photograph by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz.
In my new book Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City, I discuss three key elements of the built and enacted landscapes that Latin American migrantes adapted to the space of U.S. cities since the 1960s: the transportation landscape, the commercial landscape, and the residential landscape. The greater propensity of Latino immigrants to go from place to place on foot, their opening and patronage of locally-serving small businesses (see Figure 2), and their active use of their front yards and sidewalks (Figure 3) combined to dramatically improve any number of indices of neighborhood well-being, from rising property values to better collective efficacy to fast-falling rates of violent crime.
Latino migrants and immigrants were able to establish forms of city life that shared many of the characteristics and achieved some of the goals established years before by the New Urbanism. But rather than being the province of well-to-do elites, these were the creations of working-class people. Their forms of urbanism promoted a safer, healthier public sphere, both for them and for their non-Hispanic neighbors. They revived some of the key features of a public realm that had begun disappearing decades before, creating new norms of public presence and out-of-doors sociability. And that was a key feature of driving down some of the pathologies that characterized the urban crisis—and that informed the malaise of public intellectuals like Sennett, Ehrenhalt, and Putnam.
These migrantes created and sustained a remarkable bulwark for sustainable urbanism. The question today is whether their remarkable achievements can be sustained in a period of still-worsening inequality, actual and potential gentrification, and, especially, emboldened nativism and anti-Latino racism.
