When Tanya had told me how much she loved Mike's diner, she had explained that it was the talk that cast that special spell: “You just hear people talking. . . . It's a very mixed crowd in here, race, sex, age . . . and you hear people talking trash. . . . Mike gives the place its life, ’cause he'll talk to anybody and he'll talk crap with anybody!” Philosopher Yi Fu Tuan elaborates, “The kinds of words and the tone of voice used seems to infect the material environment, as though a light—tender, bright, or sinister, has been cast over it.” 1 While Tewolde's closeness to his companions in activism and Neville's profound relationship with his bike riders are important ways that people relate to each other over time, low-stakes casual talk—talking trash!—between people who might have little in common also contributes to building the kind of social capital that helps us “get by.”
This kind of casual talk can sound simply like, “How about this weather?!” while also being an act of respect, boundary-crossing, and recognition of shared humanity through simple banter. These kinds of conversations can be simultaneously both boring and extraordinary, becoming, in geographer Ash Amin's evocative phrase, “sites of banal transgression.” 2 Place identity is, as social psychologists John Dixon and Kevin Durrheim write, “something that people create together through talk.” 3 For this kind of talk to occur requires places where people bump into each other, share small similarities, have a few minutes to chat. Certainly not every neighborhood site sustains dialogue, or even good conversation. Moving toward better conversation can be dependent in part on people, in part on the physical form of a place, and in part on the time and rhythms in that place.
In Prospect Heights and Mosswood, an idea of mixedness was central to many people's discussions of their neighborhoods—from reminiscences about a Prospect Heights realtor who sought to make mixed-race couples feel at home in the neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s when not everywhere did, to Marty's descriptions of the Mosswood of his childhood as “a solidly Black, middle-class neighborhood, a lot of Japanese, a few Portuguese left, and a few Italian old-timers.” In this celebrated diversity—or to return to Iris Young's unsentimental phrase, a “being together of strangers in openness to group difference”—these are neighborhoods where meanings may be contested, claimed by multiple groups or even directly at odds with one another. How values of boundary-crossing and respect are shared is idiosyncratic; rather than being fixed or static, being together as strangers requires continual negotiation, and places in which that negotiation can take place.4
The casual interactions and conversations in places from diners to sidewalks to driveways echo landscape architect Clare Rishbeth's work on the importance of spaces that are “shared and multiple.” In her work on public spaces in the heterogeneous neighborhood of Burngreave, Sheffield, in the UK, she stresses that the “overlapping use of public space by different ethnic communities” provides two simple prerequisites for dialogue: “the opportunity for gradual informal contact and . . . a visual shared recognition to the diversity of a neighbourhood.” 5 The simple regularity of seeing people who are different than oneself—and, in Freire's terms, seeing them as people, not objects—can be a real step toward the ability to engage in dialogue. Informal aspects of understanding difference as part of your everyday are significant.6 Even when the public realm does not offer in-depth encounters, what Rishbeth calls incidental encounters can be a part of cohesive communities, in which people value identity both within an ethnic group and within a multicultural neighborhood. Engaging in simple ways can be a start for us to name and place ourselves in the world, testing out prejudgments, searching out meaning, potentially developing critical perspective.
Some of the places that work most powerfully to help us be in community are made possible by someone who creates a space that can do this work. In Prospect Heights, Mike—owner of George's / The Usual—knows that he creates a place conducive to the collective life of the neighborhood. Mike himself plays a crucial role within this physical space in which the counter is the right height for comfortable conversation between those sitting and those standing; one could say that he is the kind of person who facilitates everyday talk. Not only is it crucial for a community like this to have a place where all these private neighborhoods come together, it is also essential for Mike as a businessman; he must work to build a coherent sense of place, in part to keep customers happy. In a way, he realizes that this process of engaging with each other might be a start toward what Freire calls educating “each other through the mediation of the world.” 7
Tanya points again to the picture that she had pulled out of the stack—of Mary and a customer at the counter, about which she had remarked on how many different people talked to each other in this place and how the diner had helped her develop her sense of self, her own sense of ethics and belonging. She further explains about its connection to community talk as well: “This is Mike's. Of all these pictures, this one, ’cause the phone's constantly going, people sit and read their paper. . . . It's just like seeing the place full, with a bunch of people, and the waitresses just running around, you know? Talking . . . I mean, you look at it in society and where are you able to connect?”
Several weeks later, Mike picks up the same photograph from the stack. “Let me see that one?!” he exclaims. “That's Jean, of course. I know everybody. They're in my place, all the time.” A few years later, a third person looks at the same picture. Duke—a local realtor born and raised in Prospect Heights—echoes Mike: “I know this guy here, his name is Jean. He's still around here. He drives a cab. You showed Mike this? I know he's happy to see this. This is our community, and although it has twenty thousand people in the community, I feel like I know or have seen the faces of many of them.”
Mike tells me, “I treat everyone the same.” Everyone can talk about everything in his shop. In this statement, Mike is clarifying for me the issues that are at stake in a place that has so many different people and where talk across racial and class divides is essential. He sees his restaurant as enabling people to act out, practice, and speak their negotiation: “This place, it's not like any other place, not because it's mine, well maybe it is because it's mine, because we can talk about anything in here. And with girls, guys, you can talk about sex, drugs, rock and roll, politics, anything. And you know you can talk about anything and it makes you feel good.” I ask him what's missing from the photographs I've made of his place, and what might be missing if I showed them to someone who'd never been there, and I joke that they're missing the hubbub and the shouting. “Yeah, all the lingo!” he exclaims, and goes on, “You should have been here this morning, oh my god, I was freakin’ screaming at everybody, you know? In a playing way, ’cause everybody's kidding me about the Raiders, you know? . . . The whole Sanitation was here this morning, because two weeks ago, I took all their money, you know? . . . I'd cover any bet, you know, and then of course you're not allowed back in here until you pay up, you know?” He stops for a breath, then continues, “Yeah, maybe you should record. Come in and have coffee with Emily, and record what's going on—the sounds, the noise. Two eggs scrambled, you know? George's! That's all you hear all morning, you know, George's! George's!”
Mike starts to explain more about the importance of his place, and all the people who call up wanting “the usual.” He tells me, “I know people's coffees like crazy!” and then recites my own order back to me: “Like you, I know your coffee, right, regular? Bagel, buttered.” But he goes on, talking about certain customers in particular: “Imagine, every day, especially old people: 286 Park Place, 299 Park Place, 366 Park Place, 201 Park Place; 99 Saint Marks, 166 Saint Marks, 234 Saint Marks. Everyday day they call. They're little old ladies, little old men. And we won't see them all winter. But as soon as spring comes, then we see them.”
Here the conversation is not even to express whether a coffee is light and sweet or black; rather, this information becomes secondary to a conversation held even over the phone that ties a community together. But there may also be a limit, and a limit that those who facilitate these places may impose—for the dialogue or the ability to be peaceably together, or the good of the business. Mike clarifies, remembering the months of the 1995 trial of African American football star O. J. Simpson, accused of murdering his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, both of whom were white:
Sports in this neighborhood is huge! So, sports is the topic, and whatever's in the newspaper. Me, I'll do anything to get somebody to laugh. It could go anywhere, this conversation. But—when we first opened up this store, it was O. J. crisis. I put up a sign: “The subject of O. J. is strictly prohibited.” Because it's going to end up Black and white. I'm white, you're Black! I don't want it to go there. I talk about it in Manhattan, that's where it goes, I talk about it in Bay Ridge, that's where it goes. I have a business to run. It's not a discussion, it's an argument. Make noise, who cares, but if there's gonna be an argument, especially between Black and white, I'm not about that.
Am I making too much out of this chatter? Maybe it doesn't rise to the level of dialogue, but, as informal educator Mark Smith suggests, words like talk, chat, and conversation give us a sense of the fluidity needed when thinking of the messy everyday context.8 Any everyday talk offers the possibility for addressing the taken-for-granted, and Smith suggests that engaging with each other—whatever the subject matter—is significant in itself, entailing many of the same emotions noted as prerequisites for loftier dialogue.
Sometimes there are no facilitators, or there is a changing cast of many facilitators and agreed-upon practices in different locations that enable this casual talk and the acknowledgment of shared humanity that it cultivates. These self-organized spaces do important work, often out in public on the sidewalk. In their Brooklyn neighborhood, both Julia and Akosua talked about “the fence,” more a practice than a fixed location, but one that did crucial community placework to navigate politics, grief, and mutual aid. This fence was not one particular fence, but rather a way of interacting with a particular architecture of Brooklyn, where multifamily houses often have front yards, even if they're small, and the stoops that come down into these front yards, what Julia calls her porch, are often separated from the street by a low metal fence with a gate to the sidewalk. This way of being together, not focused on any one particular fence, is what sociologist AbdouMaliq Simone calls people as infrastructure, wherein an intersection of individual and institutional actions, structures, and constraints help create “highly mobile and provisional possibilities for how people live and make things, how they use the urban environment and collaborate with one another.” 9
In 2006, Julia talked about the controversy that was raging in the neighborhood around the proposed Atlantic Yards development—of a stadium and high-rises on both public land given to private developers and private land that would be taken by eminent domain. She explained the quandary in which development and gentrification had placed her. She talked about how this shaped interactions with friends and neighbors—and the ways that it shook their ways of being to the core—epitomized by what was happening in the spaces of the stoop and the fence. The development came to signify both the thing itself and the community disagreements and bitterness that it spurred, leaving her with a sense of loss and disruption in the social fabric of her community, even before anything had been built:
People had signs up—Atlantic Yards pro and con—who's a fool, you're a fool, they're a fool. “You say you're for affordable housing, how you can be for affordable housing if you're not for this project?” “You think there's actually going to be affordable housing in this project?!”
Friends of mine and I, on opposite sides of the argument, see each other and we're like, “We used to be more friendly.” And we couldn't figure out what to do about being more friendly.
And I said, smile more; what I'll do is I'll sit on my porch more, I said, you sit on your porch more. We used to sit on the porch—we were so broke that was the only entertainment we had. Sit on the porch, have a cigarette, say hello to people, give ‘em shots. And we didn't do it a lot, but we did it enough . . .
And the other thing that we did on Saint Marks, if you have old clothes, you hang them over your fence. When people say, “Where did you get that outfit?” I go, “From the fence.” Those shoes? From the fence.
But it sort of faded away. It's less and less.
We were saying that we used to be nicer, and I said, well, we used to have less money.
Ten years later, the fence was still happening, or was still remembered by Akosua, a recently displaced Prospect Heights resident, as one of the things she'd keenly miss about the neighborhood:
One thing that I think is lovely is the habit of just leaving something on the sidewalk. I think that's a very beautiful aspect of the community . . . and it's a reflection of community, in living color. My father passed away. And you know, a lot of men like to collect caps. So, I hung out his caps. I was very tearful when I was doing this and this man [walking along] . . . picked up on my sadness. So then he starts talking to me to help me come back to the present . . . I was able to focus on what I was doing and the conversation that we were having. And he took all of my father's caps. There were shirts that I had put up, he said, “Well, let me take these things.” The sharing was happening.10
This self-organized sharing was facilitated by fences, stoops, and sidewalks wide, quiet, and well-traveled enough for a much-needed conversation to happen between neighbors.
In our car-centric Mosswood neighborhood, where much travel takes people out of the neighborhood or to specific, self-selecting locations, the sites for casual talk in local community are often impromptu, diffuse, or in-between. Cynthia, for example, loves to talk with people and explains where she finds her casual conversation in Oakland—in contrast to Los Angeles, where she used to live: “Nobody walks anywhere in LA. You walk from your kitchen table to the garage, you get in your car, and then you drive. . . . And that's not true here, because most of the houses don't have attached garages! So at least you have to walk from where you parked your car to get to your house. And in that walking, you sometimes get to say hello to your neighbors. You know?” Cynthia is serious. Although this is a radically different model from Brooklyn, where most people are pedestrians most of the time, these in-between/informal spaces just beyond the envelope of the home in Oakland can't be ignored. Her sense of the neighborhood hinges on her feeling that she engages regularly with her neighbors in these spaces between house and car—negotiating to cross racial and ethnic barriers, to help her neighbors accept her as an out lesbian, and, finally, to make her neighborhood feel a little more like the working-class Italian neighborhood of Chicago in which she grew up, where everyone knew her grandmother were Cynthia to be seen on the street doing anything wrong. Now, she said, people two or three blocks away don't recognize anyone.
Her reverie put me in mind of a book about a different part of Chicago from that in which Cynthia grew up. In Duneier's Slim's Table, about Chicago's South Side, one resident remembers the neighborhood as once being full of people who knew you as a child:
Ted began, “On our block you would get chastised by any old lady. ‘Boy, what are you doing over here? Does your mother know you are over here?’ She'd get you on your toes by the ear and she'd drag you home. ‘I found him over on Lafayette.’ You could get chastised by anyone in the neighborhood.”
“That's true,” Slim said. “Oh, yeah. You had about twelve mothers, seventeen fathers. Everybody knew what you did.” 11
Back in Prospect Heights, this same sort of care and correction came both on the streets and in local spaces, as local entrepreneur Bob Law reminisced about his childhood in Prospect Heights in one of the public gatherings for Intersection | Prospect Heights in 2015: “The candy store was a hub . . . a depository for ideas for the neighborhood, and Norma would lecture us: don't do things that cause harm. Growing up, all the adults in the neighborhood had dominion over me. I don't think there's a store like that now.”
For Cynthia, this morality of the casual interaction was intersected by her sense of values—by the way her neighborhood was doing the placework of both helping her to become herself, being valued and having values, and to become part of community:
I know how to behave! What I want is a sense that if my house were being broken into, my neighbors would call the police. I want a sense that you know, in an earthquake, if somebody was at work, and her teenage daughter was home, I would go and grab them and tell them, ‘Come on, with me, we're getting to someplace safe,’ and I could call my neighbor and say, ‘I have your daughter, everybody's fine’—I want a sense that we're all looking out for one another! And that's not easy to create in this world—and so I try to walk my neighborhood and I try to say hello to everyone I see.
As I relisten to the recording of Cynthia's voice and her passionate “I know how to behave!” it puts me in mind of Rocky again, back in Brooklyn, several years later, who would explain that the problem of gentrification, of brownstones being sold for millions, is that she felt that people who paid a lot of money for something that was only for them would not know how to behave in a neighborhood, would not know how even to use the space of a stoop that had the potential to foster that essential casual talk that glues a neighborhood together, because they had “no idea how to be neighborly.”