John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909–1996) was not only an esteemed geographer and interpreter of the American landscape but an essayist of originality and style. He started the magazine Landscape, which analyzed the actual ways Americans were shaping the land; he called it the “vernacular” landscape. Far from decrying that interaction, or deploring the incursion of people into the countryside, Jackson stated that the beauty of the American landscape “derives from the human presence.” “The Stranger’s Path,” his defense of the often shaggy neighborhoods around bus terminals and railroad stations, bespeaks his delight in the comings and goings of humanity and his resistance to the sterile prettifications and working-class displacements that were a product in his day of federally funded urban renewal programs.
(1957)
As one who is by way of being a professional tourist with a certain painfully acquired knowledge of how to appraise strange cities, I often find myself brought up short by citizens remarking that I can’t really hope to know a town until I have seen the inside of one of its homes. I usually agree, expecting that there will then ensue an invitation to their house and a chance to admire one of these shrines of local culture, these epitomes of whatever it is the town or city has to offer. All that follows is an urgent suggestion that I investigate on my own the residential quarter before I presume to form a final opinion. “Ours is a city of homes,” they add. “The downtown section is like that anywhere else, but our Country Club Heights”—or Snob Hill or West End or European Section or Villa Quarter, depending on where I am—“is considered unique.”
I have accordingly set out to explore that part of the city, and many are the hours I have spent wandering through carefully labyrinthine suburbs, seeking to discover the essential city, as distinguished from that of the tourist or transient. In retrospect, these districts all seem indistinguishable: tree- and garden-lined avenues and lanes, curving about a landscape of hills with pretty views over other hills; the traffic becomes sparser, the houses retreat further behind tall trees and expensive flowers; every prospect is green, most prosperous and beautiful. The latest-model cars wait on the carefully raked driveway or at the immaculate curb, and there comes the sound of tennis being played. When evening falls, the softest, most domestic lights shine from upstairs windows; the only reminder of the nearby city is that dusty pink glow in the sky which in any case the trees all but conceal.
Yet why have I always been glad to leave? Was it a painful realization that I was excluded from these rows and rows of (presumably) happy and comfortable homes that has always ended by making me beat a retreat to the city proper? Or was it a conviction that I had actually seen this, experienced it, relished it after a fashion countless times and could no longer derive the slightest spark of inspiration from it? Ascribe it if you like to a kind of sour grapes, but in the course of years of travel I have come to believe that the home, the domestic establishment, far from being a unique symbol of the local way of life, is essentially the same wherever you go. The lovely higher-income residential zone of Spokane is, I suspect, hardly to be distinguished (except for a few interesting but not very significant architectural variations) from the corresponding zone of Oslo or Naples or Rio de Janeiro. Granted the sanctity of the home, its social, cultural, biological importance, is it necessarily the truest index of a society? Offhand, I would say the stranger could derive just as revealing an insight into a foreign way of life by listening to a country sermon or reading the classified ads in a popular newspaper or watching the behavior of a crowd during a street altercation—or, for that matter, by deciphering the graffiti on public walls.
At all events, the home is not everything. The residential quarter, despite its undeniable charms, is not the entire city, and if we poor lonely travelers are ignorant of the joys of existence on Monte Vista Terrace and Queen Alexandra Lane, we are on the other hand apt to know much more about some other aspects of the city than the lifelong resident does. I am thinking in particular of that part of the city devoted to the outsider, the transient, devoted to receiving him and satisfying his immediate needs. I am possibly prone to overemphasize this function of the city, for it is naturally the one I see most of; but who is it, I’d like to know, who keeps the city going, who makes it important to the outside world: the permanent resident with his predictable tastes and habits, or the stranger who brings money and business and new ideas? Both groups, of course, are vital to the community; their efforts are complementary; but there is a peculiar tendency among us to think of the city as a self-contained and even a sort of defensive unit forever struggling to keep its individuality intact. “Town” in English comes from a Teutonic word meaning “hedge” or “enclosure”; strange that this concept, obsolete a thousand years and more, should somehow have managed to stow away and cross the Atlantic, so that even in America we are reluctant to think of our cities as places where strangers come; with us the resident is always given preference. I gather it was quite the opposite in ancient Egypt; there the suffix corresponding to “town” or “ton” meant “the place one arrives at”—a notion I much prefer.
Anyhow, regardless of our hesitation to think of our cities as “places one arrives at” in pursuit of business or pleasure or new ideas, that is actually what most of them are. Every sizable community exists partly to satisfy the outsider who visits it. Not only that; there always evolves a special part of town devoted to this purpose. What name to give this zone of transients is something of a problem, for unlike the other subdivisions of the city, this one, I think, must be thought of in terms of movement along a pretty well defined axis. For the stranger progresses up a reasonably predictable route from his point of arrival to his final destination—and then, of course, he is likely to retrace his steps. Call it a path, in the sense that it is a way not deliberately constructed or planned for that purpose. Actually, the Strangers’ Path is, in most cities, easily recognizable, once a few of its landmarks are known, and particularly (so I have found) in American cities of between, say, twenty and fifty thousand. Larger cities naturally possess a Strangers’ Path of their own, but often it is so extensive and complex that it is exceedingly hard to define. As for towns of less than twenty thousand, the Path here is rarely fully developed, so that it is equally difficult to trace. Thus the Path I am most familiar with is the one in the smaller American city.
Where it begins is easy enough to establish, for it is the place where the stranger first disembarks. You may object that this can be almost anywhere, but the average stranger still arrives by bus or train or truck, and even if he arrives in his own car, he is likely to try to park somewhere outside the more congested downtown area. Arrival therefore signifies a change in the means of transportation: from train or truck or bus or car to something else, and this transfer is likely to take place either at the train station or the bus depot. Near these establishments (and for a variety of obvious reasons) you will also find the truck centers, the larger parking lots, and even a taxi stand or two.
So the beginning of the Path is marked by the abandoned means of transportation and the area near the railroad tracks. We are welcomed to the city by a smiling landscape of parking lots, warehouses, pot-holed and weed-grown streets, where isolated filling stations and quick-lunch counters are scattered among cinders like survivals of a bombing raid. But where does the Path lead from here? Directly to the center of town? To the hotels or the civic center or the main street? Not necessarily, and I believe we can only begin to follow the strangers’ progress into the city when we have found out who these strangers are and what they are after. There are cities, to be sure, where most transients are well-heeled tourists and pleasure seekers: Las Vegas is one, and Monte Carlo is another; so are countless other resort towns all over the globe. The Path in such places usually leads directly to a hotel. But “stranger” does not always mean “tourist,” and by and large the strangers who come to town for a day or two belong to a more modest class: not very prosperous, often with no money at all. They are men looking for a job or on their way to a job; men come to buy or sell one item in their line of business, men on a brief holiday. In terms of cash outlay in the local stores, no very brilliant public; in terms of labor and potential skills, in terms of experience of other ways of doing things, of other ways of thinking, a very valuable influx indeed. Besides, is it not one of the chief functions of the city to exchange as well as to receive? Furthermore, the greater part of these strangers would seem to be unattached men from some smaller town or from the country. These characteristics are worth bearing in mind, for they make the Path in the average small city what it now is: loud, tawdry, down-at-the-heel, full of dives and small catchpenny businesses, and (in the eyes of the uptown residential white-collar element) more than a little shady and dangerous.
Some urban geographer will be able to explain why the Strangers’ Path becomes more respectable the further it gets from its point of origin; why the flophouses and brothels and the poorest among the second-hand shops (now euphemistically called loan establishments—the three golden balls are a thing of the past), the dirtiest and steamiest of greasy spoons tend to cluster around those first raffish streets near the depot and bus and truck terminals, and why the city’s finest hotel, its most luxurious night club, its largest restaurant with a French name and illustrated menus are all at the other end. But so it is; one terminus of the Path is Skid Row, the other is the local Great White Way, and remote though they seem from each other, they are still organically and geographically linked. The moral is clear: the Path caters to every pocketbook, every taste, and what gives it its unifying quality and sets it off from the rest of the city is its eagerness to satisfy the unattached man from out of town, here either for a brief bout of pleasure or on some business errand.
Still, it would be foolish to maintain that the Path is everywhere identical; somewhere between its extremes, one of squalor, the other of opulence, it achieves its most characteristic and vigorous aspect, and it is in this middle region of the Path that the town seems to display all that it has to offer the outsider, though in a crude form. The City as Place of Exchange: such a definition in the residential section, even in the section devoted to public institutions, would seem incongruous, but here you learn its validity. Nearby on a converging street or in a square you find the local produce market. It is not so handsome and prosperous as it once was, for except in the more varied farming regions of the United States it has dwindled to a weekly display of potted plants and fryers and a few seasonal vegetables; Lancaster, Pennsylvania, has a noteworthy exception. But still the market, even in its reduced state, survives in most of the small cities I have visited, and it continues to serve as a center for a group of feed and grain stores, hardware stores, and an occasional tractor and farm implements agency. Here in fact is another one of those trans-shipment points; the streets surrounding the market are crowded with farm trucks, and with farmers setting out to explore the Path. Exchange is taking place everywhere you look: exchange of goods for cash; exchange of labor for cash (or the promise of cash) in the employment agencies, with their opportunities scrawled in chalk on blackboards; exchange of talk and drink and opinion in a dozen bars and beer parlors and lunch counters; exchange of mandolins and foreign pistols and diamond rings against cash—to be exchanged in turn against an hour or so with a girl. The Path bursts into a luxuriance of colored and lighted signs: Chiliburgers. Red Hots. Unborn Calf Oxfords: They’re New! They’re Smart! They’re Ivy! Double Feature: Bride of the Gorilla—Monster from Outer Space. Gospel Evangelical Mission. Checks Cashed. Snooker Parlor. The Best Shine in Town! Dr. Logan and His Amazing Europathic Method. Coney Islands. Fortunes Told: Madame LaFay. And Army surplus stores, tattoo parlors, barbershops, poolrooms lined with pinball and slot machines, gift shops with Chinese embroidered coats and tea sets. Along one Path after another—in Paducah and Vicksburg and Poplar Bluff and Quincy—I have run across, to my amazement, strange little establishments (wedged in, perhaps, between a hotel with only a dark flight of steps on the street and a luggage store going out of business) where they sell joke books and party favors and comic masks—worthy reminders, that the Path, for all its stench of beer and burning grease, its bleary eyes and uncertain clutching of doorjams, its bedlam of jukeboxes and radios and barkers, is still dedicated to good times. And in fact the Path is at its gayest and noisiest and most popular from Saturday noon until midnight.
You may call this part of town what you like: Skid Row, the Jungle, the Tenderloin, Hell’s Kitchen, or (in the loftier parlance of sociology) a depressed or obsolescent area; but you cannot accurately call it a slum. It is, as I have said, primarily a district for unattached men from out of town. This implies a minority of unattached women, but it does not imply that any families live here. No children are brought up here, no home has to struggle against the atmosphere of anarchy. That is why you find no grocery or household furniture or women’s and children’s clothing stores, though stores with gifts for women are numerous enough. Not being an urban morphologist, I have no inkling of why there are no slum dwellings here, nor, for that matter, of where in the city makeup slums are likely to occur; but I have yet to find anywhere even the remotest connection between an extensive slum area and the Strangers’ Path.
But then there is much in the whole matter that mystifies me. I cannot understand why loan establishments always exist cheek by jowl with the large and pretentious small city bank buildings; why the Path merges almost without transition into the financial section of the city. Yet I have observed this too often to be entirely mistaken. Scollay Square in Boston is not far from State Street, New York’s Bowery is not far (in metropolitan terms) from Wall Street, and Chicago’s Skid Row, the classic of them all, is only a few blocks from the center of the financial district: and nowhere is there a slum between the two extremes. I imagine the connection here is one easily explained in terms of the nineteenth-century American city and its exchange function; perhaps the Path was originally a link between warehouse and counting house, between depot and Main Street. And there are other traits I find equally hard to fathom: why the Path rarely if ever touches on the fashionable retail district or the culturally conscious civic center with its monument and museum and library and welfare organizations housed in remodeled old mansions. These two parts of town are of course the favorite haunts of the residents of the city: is that why the Path avoids all contact with them?
When the Path has reached the region of banks and hotels—usually grouped around one or two intersections in the average small city—it has lost much of its loud proletarian quality, and about all that is left is a newsstand with out-of-town papers, a travel agency, and an airline office on the ground floor of the dressy hotel. Here at one of the busiest corners it seems to pause and hesitate: Main Street leads to the substantial older residential district, and eventually (if you’re persistent and ambitious enough) to beautiful, restricted Country Club Heights. Broadway is the beginning of the retail shopping district. The Path finally makes its way to City Hall; and here it is, among the surrounding decrepit brick office buildings dating from the last century, that it touches upon another and final aspect of the city: the politico-legal. Lawyers, the legal aid society, bonding companies, insurance agents, a new (but no less rapacious) breed of finance establishments proliferate among dark, wainscoted corridors and behind transoms in high-ceilinged rooms. With a kind of artistic appropriateness, the initial hangdog atmosphere of the depot and flophouse reasserts itself around the last landmark on the Path, the City Hall. Groups of hastily sobered-up faces gather forlornly outside the traffic court and the police court, or on the steps of the City Hall itself, while grimy documents are passed about. From across the street, the YMCA, the Salvation Army, and the Guild of Temperance Women look on benevolently, wanting to make friends but never quite succeeding. The Red Cross, on the other hand, dwells in proud seclusion in the basement of the Federal Building, several blocks away.
Is it in this manner that the Strangers’ Path comes to an end? If so, how sad, and how pointed the moral: Start your career in brothels and saloons and you wind up, hat in hand, before the police magistrate. But this is not invariably the case, and for all I have been able to discover the Path (or some portion of it) may go on to other, happier goals. Yet it is here that it ceases to be a distinct feature of the urban landscape; from now on it is dispersed among all the other currents of city life. And the simile which inevitably comes to mind is that of a river, a stream; a powerful, muddy, untidy, but immensely fertile stream which, after being joined by its tributaries, briefly cuts its own characteristic channel in the gaudy middle section of its course, then, arrived at the center of town, fans out to deposit its waters and their burden, and vanishes.
There are two reasons for my trying to describe this part of the average American city that I have called the Stranger’s Path. First, I wanted to show the people of that city that while they may know the residential section and be immensely proud of it, there is probably something about the downtown section (something very valuable in its way) that they have never recognized. My second reason is that I have derived much pleasure from exploring the Path and learning a few of its landmarks; hours in unknown cities that might otherwise have been dull thereby became enjoyable. And indeed every city has such a section; there are remains of it among the ruins of Pompeii; it was an integral part of every medieval town, and I have run across it in its clearest form in Mexico and in the Balkans.
But what many people will ask is, how important is the Strangers’ Path to the modern city? What sort of a future does it have? To such questions I can give no educated answer. When I likened it to a river, I was using no very original simile, yet a simile having the virtue of aptness and of suggesting two characteristics. The Path, as I see it, has the prime function of introducing new life to the city, of bringing the city into touch with the outside world. (That it also has the no less valuable function of bringing the villager, the lonely field worker or traveling salesman or trucker, or the inhabitant of a dehumanized commercial farming landscape into touch with urban culture goes without saying.) Granted that these contacts are not always on a very exalted or even worthwhile scale, and that they are increasingly confined to the lowest class of citizen; nevertheless, they are what keep an infinite number of businesses and arts and crafts alive, and they represent what is after all one of the chief purposes of the city: to serve as a place of general exchange. For my part, I cannot conceive of any large community surviving without this ceaseless influx of new wants, new ideas, new manners, new strength, and so I cannot conceive of a city without some section corresponding to the Path.
The simile was further that of a stream which empties into no basin or lake, merely evaporating into the city or perhaps rising to the surface once more outside of town along some highway strip; and it is this lack of a final, well-defined objective that prevents the Path from serving an even more important role in the community and that tends to make it a poor-man’s district. For when the stranger, the transient, has finished his business, something in the layout of the city should invite him to linger and become part of the town, should impel him to pay his respects, as it were. In other words, the Path should open into the center of civic leisure, into a square or plaza where citizens gather.
“Well,” says the city planner, “we have given that matter some thought. We have decided to demolish the depressed area of the city (including your so-called Path where the financial return is low, the sanitation bad, and the traffic hopeless) and erect a wonderful series of apartment houses for moderate-income white-collar workers, who are the backbone of our country. We will landscape the development with wading pools, flagstone walks, and groves of Chinese elms, and we are also putting in a series of neighborhood shopping centers. And that is not all,” he continues enthusiastically. “The City Hall is being removed, a handsome park will take its place, with parking facilities for five hundred cars underneath, and more shops, as high-class as possible, will be built around the square.” He then goes on to talk about the pedestrian traffic-free center, with frequent references to the Piazza San Marco in Venice.
All well and good; freedom from traffic is what we want, and no one can object to a pretty square where none existed before. But I am growing a little weary of the Piazza San Marco. I yield to no one in my admiration of its beauty and social utility, but it seems to me that those who hold it up as the prototype of all civic (traffic-free) centers are not always aware of what makes it what it is. The piazza is not an area carved out of a residential district; its animation comes not from the art monuments which surround it; on the contrary, it is enclosed on three sides by a maze of streets and alleys whose function is almost exactly that of the Path; moreover, the Piazza San Marco has a landing-place where farmers, fishermen, sailors, merchants, and travelers all first disembark—or used to disembark—in the city. These prosaic characteristics are what give life to it. And then, how about the universal absence of wheeled traffic in Venice? The Mediterranean plaza is a charming and healthy institution, which American cities would be wise to adopt, but the plaza is organically connected with the workaday life of the city. It has never served, it was never intended to serve, as a place of business. It is the center of group leisure; it is the civic parlor and it therefore adjoins the civic workroom or place of exchange. The notion of a pedestrian plaza in the center of every small American city is a good one, but if it is merely to serve as a focal point for smart shops and “culture,” then I still do not see in it any substitute for the Path.
There are others who try to persuade us that the suburban or residential shopping center is the civic center of the future. Victor Gruen, who is justifiably happy over his enormous (and enormously successful) shopping centers in Detroit and Minneapolis, tells us that these establishments (or rather their handsomely landscaped surroundings) are already serving more and more as the scene of holiday festivities, art shows, and pageants, as well as of general sociability and of supervised play for children. I have no doubt of it; but the shopping center, no matter how big, how modern, how beautiful, is the exact opposite of the Path. Its public is almost exclusively composed of housewives and children, it imposes a uniformity of taste and income and interests, and its strenuous efforts to be self-contained mean that it automatically rejects anything from outside. And compared to any traditional civic center—market place, bazaar, agora—what bloodless places these shopping centers are! I cannot see a roustabout fresh from the oil fields, or (at the other extreme) a student of manners willingly passing an hour in one of them; though both could spend a day and a night in the Path with pleasure and a certain amount of profit. Art shows indeed! It strikes me that some of our planners need to acquire a more robust idea of city life. Perhaps I do them an injustice, but I often have the feeling that their emphasis on convenience, cleanliness, and safety, their distrust of everything vulgar and small and poor, is symptomatic of a very lopsided view of urban culture.
Possibly this is the price we have to pay for planning becoming respectable, but it would be well if a wider and more humane understanding of the city and its problems soon evolved in this country. There is much to be done, and planners are the only ones who can do it. No one, I suppose, would wish to see the Stranger’s Path remain as it is: garish and dirty and decaying, forced to expend its vitality in mean and neglected streets, cheated of a final merger with the broader life of the city. Yet even in its present sad state it has the power to suggest the avenue it might become, given imaginative treatment. Among the famous and best-loved streets of the world, how many of them are simply glorifications of the Strangers’ Path! The Rambla in Barcelona, more than a mile of tree-lined boulevard with more trees and a promenade down the center, is such a one; and the Cannebière in Marseilles is another. They both link the harbor (the point of arrival) with the uptown area; neither of them is a show street in terms of architecture, and they are not bordered by expensive or fashionable shops. The public which frequents them at every hour of the day and night is not a “class” public: it is composed of a large cross-section of the population of the city—men, women, and children, rich and poor, strangers and natives. It happens that the residential section of both of these cities contains architectural wonders which must be visited—Gaudi’s church in Barcelona, Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseilles—and here (as in so many other places) I have done my duty, only to return as fast as possible to the center of town and those marvelous avenues.
There are few greater delights than to walk up and down them in the evening along with thousands of other people; up and down, relishing the lights coming through the trees or shining from the facades, listening to the sounds of music and foreign voices and traffic, enjoying the smell of flowers and good food and the air from the nearby sea. The sidewalks are lined with small shops, bars, stalls, dance halls, movies, booths lighted by acetylene lamps; and everywhere are strange faces, strange costumes, strange and delightful impressions. To walk up such a street into the quieter, more formal part of town is to be part of a procession, part of a ceaseless ceremony of being initiated into the city and of rededicating the city itself. And that is how our first progress through even the smallest city and town should be: a succession of gay and beautiful streets and squares, all of them extending a universal welcome.
Unlike so many visions of the city of the future, this one has a firm basis in reality. The Stranger’s Path exists in one form or another in every large community, either (as in most American cities) ignored, or, as in the case of Marseilles and Barcelona and many other cities in the Old World, preserved and cherished. Everywhere it is the direct product of our economic and social evolution. If we seek to dam or bury this ancient river, we will live to regret it.