back on Meadow Street

What can we do right now besides showing that we are here?  How do we communicate some kind of commitment without waving around a glossy print out of a five year plan? If we could have thought of a better way we would have done it, but nothing came to mind. So, here we were again, squeezed under the sun umbrella on Meadow street behind the lemonade stand.

When we returned at 2:10 pm we were greeted with a smile by a man, who was hanging out at the porch across the street, talking to another man. We had seen him twice last week. We remembered him and he seemed to remember us.

After an hour of sitting, listening to the crickets and birds and some reading a woman approached us and asked what we were doing. She was living in the house next to the lot we had temporarily occupied. We answered her questions and asked a few ourselves. The woman told us that she was trying to figure out how to purchase this lot from the URA and use it to grow some vegetables, and that the process was very difficult, not only for her, but for many people in the neighborhood who tried to aquire properties from the URA. She also had been laid off since nine months, so it was not easy to get the money together either. We talked about gentrification, the Caucasian guy who had moved down the street and that Larimer had been founded by Italians who mostly moved into the suburbs in the 60’s and 70’s. After a while she left and said, that she would send her daughter to get some lemonade.

While we were pushing the stroller up and down the block the door our neighbor’s house opened and a girl asked, how much the lemonade was. About 20 minutes later she came by and got one childrens lemonade for 50 Cent and one for adults for $1. We told her, that there were free refills.

That Caucasian guy from down the street turned out to be Mike, whom we had met a couple of days earlier at the Kingsley Center, where he worked with the Summer Youth Program that Carlos was running. Mike, originally from Syracruse, had applied for the summer job at the Kingsley Center, because he needed a summer job after graduating from College. Carlos had put him in touch with the landlord on Meadow street, where he could live rent free with his two pittbull’s in exchange for doing some work on the house. When he moved in, he said, people in Larimer thought he was a cop. Mike was the second person who bought iced coffee, and while we are trying to crush the big junk of ice cubes so it would fit into the cup, Mike mentioned, that we got some competition going. His neighbors, he said, had opened up some kind of lemonade stand as well this week.
To check it out, we walked together down the street. Two white people with their weapons of defense, two pittbulls and a stroller.

The new business on the block was Emma’s shop. When we arrived a young woman was in the process of selling a popsicle to a young boy from across the street while Emma explained the advantages of her store to the mother: “It’s too dangerous to go all the way to the grocery store. So why not come here, when you can get your popsicle right across the street.”

When the boy was five Cents short, Emma said: “Don’t worry hon, we are neighbors.” We got two red white and blue popsicles and Emma said, that she was German. Her grandmother, who had come from Germany two Pittsburgh as a young woman had 21 children, one of them Emma’s father. Her grandmother became 106 years old, and on the day she died she was baking bread.

Back at the lemonade stand, eating our popsicle, watching the cars pass by, observing what was going on  around the car repair down the street and across the corner on the porch, we realized that we really enjoyed sitting on that green meadow. The moment had the romantic potential of being a glimpse into an urban village life fiction, where residents run their businesses from their homes, where neighbors walk up and down the street and talks to each other,  where kids can  ride around on their bikes without adult supervision, where crickets chirp in the trees and butterflies and bees fly from flower to flower in search for nectar. Was it strange to find the situation beautiful, was it naive? Why were we even capable of having these thoughts, when people had warned us about gun violence and robberies? May be we appreciated the authenticity of the situation. May be we hadn’t been been to a place without tourists in a long time. May be it was satisfying that all we had set out to do with the lemonade stand, was to be there. That being there, was already an accomplishment in itself. May be it was a relief to discover that there are probably always alternatives to the stereotype, and that these are actually easy accessible.

For the rest of the afternoon business was slow as usual. The neighbors daughter came back and asked for her free refill. She had not brought her old cup, so we gave her a new one, and wondered if that, technically speaking was really considered a refill? Around 4:30pm we packed up and rang the bell at Mrs. Jones house again. A hand written paper on the column of the porch informed us that we were entering Jesus’ zone. Mrs. Jones opened the door and invited us in. We sat down on the sofa in the cozy living room and talked for a while. At one point, Mr. Jones joined the conversation. We then walked through the kitchen out into the backyard, where Mrs. Jones showed us the rain barrel Carlos had hooked up as part of one of the programs that focused on turning Larimer into a green and sustainable neighborhood with local food production. The rain barrel was filled with water, but the potted plants around it were all dried up. It was obvious, that Mrs. Jones potential did not lay in growing basil and tomatoes. Mrs. Jones did not belong in a backyard. She belonged amongst people, where she could use her powerful voice to tell stories; her personal ones, the ones of her neighborhood, the history of her people. “I am a stakeholder. I am the voice of my community. I am the community… ” were the words she had used the week before at the Census Group Meeting, where the new development plans for Larimer were introduced.

Anyway, we couldn’t stay too long, because there was another meeting at the Kingsley Center, we were asked to attend. The Urban Leadership Institute meeting was led by Fred who introduced a ways to approach and communicate with strangers to the 20 people that sat around the big, grey plastic tables. As an exercise for the group who had met for the first time that evening, we had to first interview and then introduce each other. Since there was a small buffet with healthy food we could eat while doing the exercise, the atmosphere was relaxed enough to have some fun with the task. For us it was as interesting to listen to the presented facts (who was there from where for what reason and with what kind of family history), as to the way the data was presented. It was amazing how fun and engaging a few of the elderly woman could make this simple presentation.