Dunkelman - The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community

The

Vanishing

Neighbor

The Transformation of American Community

MARC J. DUNKELMAN

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

New York | London

Copyright 2014 by Marc J. Dunkelman

All rights reserved

First Edition

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Dunkelman, Marc J.

The vanishing neighbor : the transformation of
American community / Marc J. Dunkelman. First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-393-06396-7 (hardcover)

1. CommunitiesUnited States. 2. United StatesSocial conditions21st century.
3. United StatesEconomic conditions21st century.
4. United StatesCivilization21st century. I. Title.

HN59.2.D84 2014

307.0973dc23

2014020596

ISBN 978-0-393-24399-4 (e-book)

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For Kathryn

B eyond wondering whether our new family room would have enough shelving to store all my toys, I wasnt particularly alarmed when Mom and Dad announced in the summer of 1984 that wed be moving from Cincinnati to Buffalo. At no point was I fazed by the prospect of leaving the only home Id ever known, let alone the three surviving grandparents who lived nearby. Rather, and maybe in keeping with the tendencies of a kid gearing up for kindergarten, I got swept up by the adventures I imagined we might have awaiting us. Hours of cartoons had ingrained in me the impression that, when it came to big trips, unknown splendors invariably lay ahead.

It wasnt until wed fully settled into our new home that I began to appreciate just how radically life had changed. Not only were we now four hundred miles away from my favorite ice cream parlor (the Yum Yum Shop in Buffalo didnt have the same flavors as Graeters, our favorite spot in Cincinnati), but the routines of our daily lives were now much starker in the absence of familiarity. I missed the goldfish crackers my grandparents always had at the ready. I missed the regular visits from family friends and friendly neighbors. And maybe even without noticing explicitly, I missed the chance encountersmy mother bumping into an old high-school friend at the Tri-County Mallthat had peppered our lives in Ohio.

Certainly part of that was nostalgiano kid wants to give up his favorite flavor of ice cream. But there was something else as well. Lonely moments are inevitable when a family moves. But my sense that something else was missing was made ever more palpable each time we made our annual journey back to Cincinnati for the holidays.

At some point during each visit, my dads father and brother would whisk a few of us away for a tour of the old neighborhood. Wed begin at Sugar n Spice, the greasy-spoon diner that had been serving customers since 1941. And then, as I hunkered down in the back of my fathers slow-moving Chrysler minivan, the adults up front would begin to reminisce: Thats where Johnny Osher livedhe invented an electric toothbrush and made a fortune selling it to Procter & Gamble. I always had a crush on the girl who lived down the streetwhatever happened to her? That poor kid. At five oclock every eveningeven in high schoolhis mother would call him and his brother in for a bath. It was a riot.

Listening silently to the banter, I imagined then that the sense of community woven into those stories was a function of southern Ohio itself. Even after several years in Buffalo, the contrast was unmistakable. On paper, life in western New York resembled my fathers childhood fairly well. I was enrolled in the local elementary school. My parents had made friends around town. I went to Sunday school and played sports on weekday afternoons. But despite it all, our neighbors, unlike my fathers, largely remained strangers. When I began delivering the Buffalo News during the fall of my fourth-grade year, most of the names on the roster were still unfamiliar. Even after five full years in our new hometown, I wouldnt have been able to recognize the couple living two houses away if wed bumped into them at our local grocery store.

That disparity turned my nostalgia into longing. If only we could move back to Cincinnati, I imagined, Id surely be swept into the genteel neighborhood dynamic that had characterized my fathers childhood. It wasnt until a couple of decades later, while sitting down for a cup of coffee with Sean Safford, a sociologist who had also grown up in Buffalo, that I realized Id lost sight of something important. Describing his childhood, Safford explained that when he went home for a visit, his parents rarely went anywhere without bumping into someone his father knew. His father could still name the families who lived in each house on the street where he grew up. His father also liked to regale him with stories of the old neighborhood.

Saffords observation led me to question whether, in all my years pining for Ohio, Id missed the essential point. Nineteen-fifties-era Cincinnati couldnt be compared in any fair way with 1990s-era Buffaloquality of ice cream excepted. My parents Cincinnati lined up fairly well with the Buffalo that had reared Saffords father. Rather, something else had happened to change both cities during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Id been comparing apples to oranges. The real contrast revolved less around where each of us had grown up, and more around when .

But that begged the question: what had changed over the intervening decades? Certainly the dichotomy couldnt be chalked up to some blithe complaint about social isolation. Far from losing touch, technology had worked to connect Americans like never before. Over the course of a single generation, the cost of a telephone call had fallen dramatically. E-mail had emerged as an entirely new, free, and instantaneous form of communication. And with budget airlines driving the price of air travel down, families living hundreds of miles away could visit one another with much more regularity.

My erstwhile comparisons of Cincinnati and Buffalo seemed to suggest that, amid all the new opportunities to connect, something else had been lost. The sorts of relationships my grandparents had taken for granted while raising their childrenbetween neighbors and colleagues, often across generationshad withered, and others had begun to take their place. Over the course of several decades, the nations social architecture had been upended. And it wasnt until recently that a more complete picture of that shift has come into clearer view.

O ver the last 250 years, the underlying structure of American community has experienced no more than two major transformations. The first coincided with the end of the colonial period. As Brown University historian Gordon Wood outlined in his Pulitzer Prizewinning book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, our desire to break away from Britain wasnt driven simply by disgust with the English Crown. The patterns of life prevalent in the new world were different from those that characterized life in and around London, and the institutions that the colonies had inherited werent effective when applied in the new American context. Americas patriots wanted to craft a government that was responsive to a very different sort of society. And the tension inherent in that mismatch set the stage for the Revolution.