« The Remains of the Beast | Main | TRAIN PASSAGES »

April 22, 2006

Cozy Zones

What a sweet little, quiet little, provincial city Philadelphia is, compared to NYC. (I suppose anywhere one is NOT is bound to seem more peaceful than where one actually is.) Philly was a big city to me when I entered graduate school at the U of Penn in 1971. I’d grown up in sleepy 60’s Miami, which was still tropically rural and slow. For culture, we’d drive out to the Tamiami Trail to watch alligator wrestling, or visit the Everglades to watch the swamps and egrets. I thought I’d stay in Miami for good, but to my surprise I went north to college. Sarah Lawrence was tucked in a Westchester suburb like a Tudor village, very tranquil. I rarely went into New York, as close as it was, for various neurotic reasons. After college I vaulted to Philadelphia for more school. It took a while to adapt to a municipal psyche: ubiquitous public transport, an anonymous populace, and lunch-meat-colored office buildings (the full spectrum ranging from liverwurst to olive-loaf). Of course, refuge is a state of being, but being in a raucous hullabaloo doesn’t help one’s quest for inner peace.

The University was not indicative of the City of Philadelphia, but a kind of self-sufficient hamlet of picturesque old buildings: College Hall, on the quadrangle, seemed a gothic movie set (Charles Addams, a Penn alum, based his Addams family’s spooky manse on it). The art department was housed in a cauldron-walled Romanesque fortress of red stone designed by Frank Furness, famous for his elaborate 19th-century train stations. The spectacular campus architecture was both formidable and inviting, and once inside, you felt a frisson of complementary coziness. The scale was embracing, not alienating, as post-modern buildings can be. Center City and Rittenhouse Square had their muted charm. I would have settled in Philadelphia, but fate nudged me a couple inches farther up the map, in 1974, to an even bigger city.

In New York, provincialism is a rare commodity. You find it more downtown than uptown, more on the West Side than the East. For intimate nooks you borough-in to Brooklyn and Staten Island. In Manhattan, your options are fewer, but you can always peek through a fence at a churchyard lawn, or walk in a quaint Village alley, or find some potted tulips on a loading dock. On Duane Street, close to Greenwich, someone is cultivating a weed-field on the old metal warehouse awning. Homey!

Finding cozy zones of humor and humanity is challenging amid anonymity, noise, and colossal scale. Take banks, for instance. Old Miami banks were more like family rooms with their indoor palms and stucco walls of cheery sailboat prints. The tellers, sans bars or any barriers, always smiled and knew your name. Extra reassurance was discreetly provided by Muzak. How different from New York banks--mausoleums of impenetrability, high ceilings that diminish you, massive dusty windows filtering out sunlight, amplified rock that’s more dispiriting than the pittance in your account. Until recently, banks eschewed colors other than black, white or gray, save the bit of red on a deposit slip. Things are changing, though. Financial institutions are experimenting with a “user-friendly� approach, replacing bulletproof glass with armed security guards; painting the walls with heart-stopping geometrics like magnified Ellsworth Kellys. Happily, they’re also replacing “NO PETS ALLOWED!� signs with bowls of dog biscuits. Despite such humanizations, many retain an imperiousness meant to reflect the sere, serious tendering of money. But even the grimmest bank has its unexpected whiff of bonhomie. A few years ago a message appeared on the thick glass tellers’ windows: “Beware Strangers Attempting Distractions By Squirting Mustard Or Catsup On Your Person.�

How sweet is that?

Posted by Jane on April 22, 2006 12:01 PM

Comments

Post a comment