experience or witness serious crime. And even though young, my sister and I moved around Manhattan alone, by bus, subway, or on foot. I didn’t know how to go outside Manhattan. I did not experience fear, and, obviously, my parents felt comfortable enough letting me go places on my own.
The dramatic push at that time was the push of urban renewal, massive demolition, and disappearing neighborhoods. Banks stopped giving loans for businesses and properties destined to fall under the urban renewal wrecking ball. Businesses like my father’s (and later my husband’s) and residents like my family did not move out simply by choice. It is not difficult to observe how the tear in an urban fabric, regardless of its size, weakens the threads around it so further erosion becomes inevitable. The displacement by a highway, or an urban renewal clearance project, was very much the crux of the push.
Many years later, I reflected with Jane Jacobs about this period—when federal funding priorities led to sweeping changes to urban neighborhoods and downtowns. She cautioned me that “there are two kinds of change, and you can symbolize them on the land,” she explained. “There’s the kind of change in which the topsoil is being built up, and it’s being made more fertile and is good husbandry of the land. The land is changing when you do that, but it is positive change. Then there’s a kind of change that’s just as definitely change—that’s erosion. Gullies are being dug in the land, and the topsoil is being carried away and it’s being made infertile. The fact that it’s changed doesn’t mean that it’s progress. It’s ruin. But people were, for a long time, brainwashed into the idea that every sort of change in a city was progress. ‘Well, yes, it’s bad, but that’s progress.’ No, that’s erosion. And people didn’t want to be thought of as old-fashioned.”
THE SHOCK OF THE NEW
The transition to the suburbs was not easy. For me it was traumatic. To transfer from a progressive private school in Greenwich Village, the Little Red Schoolhouse, to a conservative public junior high school, Horace C. Hurlbutt Jr., in Weston was, to say the least, a dramatic shift in education and social lifestyle. The educational philosophies were opposite, one quite progressive, the other traditional. I had only learned to print at Little Red; now I had to learn to write script, almost overnight, to catch up. I had learned to build tables and make birdhouses in shop at Little Red; now I went to “home ec” with only girls and learned to bake cakes and make pudding. “Why don’t they teach you to cook a piece of meat?” my mother asked. I was used to wearing blue jeans to school; in Weston, the girls not only wore skirts or dresses but had made their clothes themselves.
Outdoor activities were probably better at Weston. In New York, we were limited to a rooftop play area or an asphalt sports field around the corner. We never felt at all deprived. But in Weston, I played basketball, baseball, and archery and—what shocks my daughters—became a cheer-leader (yes, felt skirts with poodles).
At Little Red, we had talked about big social issues, learned things about the human anatomy no public school dared teach, and even studied comparative religion—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—and visited different houses of worship. I remember reading a powerful book I think was called One God . It certainly introduced me to the idea of religious diversity and tolerance at an early age. In Weston, we started the day with not only the Pledge of Allegiance but also the Lord’s Prayer, something a private school that believed in separation of church and state would never do.
Our class at Little Red was modestly integrated racially and religiously, but in Weston, very much the Connecticut Yankee suburb, I was the outsider. I was the third Jew in this junior high school, the first from New York City. Most painful was when I had a birthday
The dramatic push at that time was the push of urban renewal, massive demolition, and disappearing neighborhoods. Banks stopped giving loans for businesses and properties destined to fall under the urban renewal wrecking ball. Businesses like my father’s (and later my husband’s) and residents like my family did not move out simply by choice. It is not difficult to observe how the tear in an urban fabric, regardless of its size, weakens the threads around it so further erosion becomes inevitable. The displacement by a highway, or an urban renewal clearance project, was very much the crux of the push.
Many years later, I reflected with Jane Jacobs about this period—when federal funding priorities led to sweeping changes to urban neighborhoods and downtowns. She cautioned me that “there are two kinds of change, and you can symbolize them on the land,” she explained. “There’s the kind of change in which the topsoil is being built up, and it’s being made more fertile and is good husbandry of the land. The land is changing when you do that, but it is positive change. Then there’s a kind of change that’s just as definitely change—that’s erosion. Gullies are being dug in the land, and the topsoil is being carried away and it’s being made infertile. The fact that it’s changed doesn’t mean that it’s progress. It’s ruin. But people were, for a long time, brainwashed into the idea that every sort of change in a city was progress. ‘Well, yes, it’s bad, but that’s progress.’ No, that’s erosion. And people didn’t want to be thought of as old-fashioned.”
THE SHOCK OF THE NEW
The transition to the suburbs was not easy. For me it was traumatic. To transfer from a progressive private school in Greenwich Village, the Little Red Schoolhouse, to a conservative public junior high school, Horace C. Hurlbutt Jr., in Weston was, to say the least, a dramatic shift in education and social lifestyle. The educational philosophies were opposite, one quite progressive, the other traditional. I had only learned to print at Little Red; now I had to learn to write script, almost overnight, to catch up. I had learned to build tables and make birdhouses in shop at Little Red; now I went to “home ec” with only girls and learned to bake cakes and make pudding. “Why don’t they teach you to cook a piece of meat?” my mother asked. I was used to wearing blue jeans to school; in Weston, the girls not only wore skirts or dresses but had made their clothes themselves.
Outdoor activities were probably better at Weston. In New York, we were limited to a rooftop play area or an asphalt sports field around the corner. We never felt at all deprived. But in Weston, I played basketball, baseball, and archery and—what shocks my daughters—became a cheer-leader (yes, felt skirts with poodles).
At Little Red, we had talked about big social issues, learned things about the human anatomy no public school dared teach, and even studied comparative religion—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—and visited different houses of worship. I remember reading a powerful book I think was called One God . It certainly introduced me to the idea of religious diversity and tolerance at an early age. In Weston, we started the day with not only the Pledge of Allegiance but also the Lord’s Prayer, something a private school that believed in separation of church and state would never do.
Our class at Little Red was modestly integrated racially and religiously, but in Weston, very much the Connecticut Yankee suburb, I was the outsider. I was the third Jew in this junior high school, the first from New York City. Most painful was when I had a birthday
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