The Millennial Pedestrian

This piece ran on the op-ed page of The Providence Journal on May 15. 

 
New to New England

“There has to be a system. There just has to be,” I said half to myself as Holly and I sat in our car at the intersection of Something Street and Somewhere Avenue in Providence and looked for a street sign. But there was none. Where were we? Cars backed up behind us but, strangely, did not honk right away.

It was not our first encounter with the maddening inconsistency of New England street signage. We had under- and overshot many destinations already in our introductory visits to Providence, our new home, but I stubbornly kept looking for an organizing principle. I wanted to understand why some streets are signed and some not. Why do some intersections have half a sign – it shows you what’s to the left or right, but not what you’re driving on?

A day or two later, a friend who’s lived here for a couple of decades explained it to us this way: “Everyone here has been here forever. They never go anywhere else because they like it here just fine. They know their way around, they don’t need no stinking street signs, so they figure, why should you?” (I’ve also been advised that insufficient signage is simply a reflection of insufficient funding. Prosaic, but plausible.)

Hmmm. Interesting. But if people here are so insular, why are they so polite and helpful, even to strangers like us? Why do they not honk the instant we pause at an unmarked intersection? Holly and I have just moved here from the heart of Gotham. We spent the last 29 years of our lives together in an apartment in Manhattan, where the streets are neatly arranged in a grid and all clearly labeled to boot. Although we think New Yorkers get a bad rap, we have been charmed and pleasantly surprised by the spontaneous enthusiasm of New Englanders – at least, Rhode Islanders — for their native state and by their graciousness.

And yet there’s nothing smarmy about these people. There’s a robust directness that gets whatever it is over quickly and efficiently, whether it’s telling us what the heck street this is or taking our order in a restaurant. It’s almost the way New Yorkers would like to be if they could only get over their programming as hyped-up urban whirligigs.

As new residents of Providence, here’s another thing we’ve noticed right away: there’s no place to throw your trash, but there is no trash on the downtown streets or sidewalks. Where does it go? In New York there’s a trash basket or two or three on every corner and yet there’s always litter blowing around. Now I understand that part of this urban cleanliness is a function of lower population density. But still. What happens to the plastic grocery bags, the snack sacks, the newspapers, the candy wrappers, the ATM receipts, the sometimes unmentionable residue of people’s private lives? What happens to the bags with dog poop in them? People have dogs here. We know. We’ve seen them. And these people must clean up after them, because there’s no evidence of their passage.

We have a dog, too. And we’ve walked for blocks – in fact, we’ve walked all the way home – carrying a steaming little Baggie-full of dog poop, because we can’t find a receptacle. What are we missing?

As we become assimilated, I suppose we’ll stop noticing the little things that now strike us. We’ll get used to calling heroes grinders and we’ll sleep through the night despite the deafening quiet. But for now, while everything here is fresh to us, we’ll keep track of what we see and hear and find unique about our new home. We’ll report our findings. And then maybe you’ll rediscover your own city through the eyes of two who are new to New England.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006.
It's part of the Prose category.
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