As many families head back to school (at last), what should they keep from the summer, besides jars of shells? New York City schools start after Labor Day. My family, like many others, tries to make the most of summer by going on vacation during the last week of August. Our getaway of choice is Fire Island, where, for the past four years, we’ve rented the same house. It isn’t ours, of course, but by now there is comfort in returning to the same corduroy sofa, the same mismatched mugs, the same rusty bicycles.
Familiarity means that we can quickly adapt to a way of life that feels very different from our daily existence in Brooklyn. And it isn’t just the lack of deadlines. The kids go in and out on their own, wandering to a friend’s house or biking to the next town over, with no more than a word of departure or a confirming text on arrival. We meet up on the beach and pretend to read. If you need to go home to use the bathroom, you go—the house isn’t locked—and come back with a bag of chips. I am not texting, calendaring, accompanying at all times. I can sit. My phone stays in a Ziploc bag for hours. Suddenly, it’s dinnertime.
For a week, I catch a glimpse of the family life that previous generations are always telling us about: “My mother kicked us out of the house after breakfast and said, ‘Don’t come back until dinner!’ ” Or, “We went out to the woods behind our house after school and built forts.” Or, “As soon as we scraped together the change, we walked downtown and went to the movies.” My father’s version is going to Brooklyn Dodgers games from Manhattan with a group of friends, the tickets acquired by saving the wrappers from ice-cream sandwiches in sticky stacks and then sending them in. A popular Daily Mail article from 2007 called this “the right to roam” and mourned its loss. On Curbed, the writer Alissa Walker watched the freewheeling nineteen-eighties kids in “Stranger Things” and thought about her daughter, noting, “I worry that the idea of letting kids explore their cities on their own is something she’ll only be able to see on TV.”
We can’t turn back the clock, except we do, every summer. In beach communities like Fire Island, in bungalow colonies, we glimpse, for however long we can afford it, the freedom children had in the past.
What do these summer places have in common? No. 1, no cars. Or cars consigned to their rightful place: the periphery. On car-free Fire Island, the road hogs are not S.U.V.s but souped-up golf carts with puffy tires, many used by the contractors who are tearing down or jacking up houses threatened by the wind and water. These carts seem too large for the roads, where standard golf carts are able to join a steady two-way stream of cyclists, scooters, and pedestrians. But, unlike our perpetually widening highways, the roads have not been broadened to accommodate more traffic, so the biggest vehicles have to go slowly and make frequent stops.
No. 2, open space. Not sequestered away behind a fence or situated at a distance but space functioning as the connective tissue of the community, whether it be beachfront, lakefront, or a rolling lawn around which tents and cabins cluster. The grass is the street, the streets are made of sand, and both private homes and public facilities—the pool, the snack bar, the mess hall—face that shared space.
No. 3, a thin line between indoors and out. Some walls can be as thin as canvas, but more often the houses in summer communities are merely uninsulated, mostly open. Sliding doors, screened porches, and decks blur the line between mine and yours, both physically and sonically. In the kitchen of the house we rent on Fire Island, the birds seem to be chirping at the teakettle, and I can watch the deer graze on the pears that have fallen over the front gate. Children, like the wildlife, can be heard from every room, but their voices blend into a pack: the children rather than “my child.”
A friend who has spent many summers in a bungalow community reports that the “house people,” who live there year-round, behave more like city folk: schedules, family dinners, home before dark. Her kids play all over—sometimes in smaller groups, divided by age, but other times as one big group, playing Prisoner or Tap Tap Trio (so her five-year-old and his friends are playing with tweens). Best of all, from her point of view as a working parent, is the end-of-day coming together of the mothers—the fathers mostly come up on the weekends—emerging from their houses to socialize on the lawn. A friend who grew up in Bensonhurst in the seventies told her that the same thing happened in the city on summer nights, a great organic gathering of women on the stoops.
Summer communities form by choice, in ways that urban neighborhoods cannot, often created and sustained by religious affiliation, ethnicity, or profession. There’s Wesleyan Grove, settled by Methodist revivalists, and the historically African-American neighborhood in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard. Sag Harbor’s black resort communities, developed in the postwar period because most beaches were whites-only, were created adjacent to Eastville, a neighborhood settled in the early nineteenth century by free black people, Native Americans, and Europeans who worked in the whaling industry.
There’s also the question of money: it is a luxury to take a summer vacation. Many of these places have always been socially exclusive and, today, even some traditionally working-class enclaves have become costly. Both the nostalgia for freedom and the present-day places you can get it are not equally available to all, nor are all children necessarily treated equally by other residents, or by police. Indeed, the security parents feel in allowing their children to run free may be predicated partly on the sense that the families in the other houses are similar to them.
And yet, while doing research for my latest book, “The Design of Childhood,” I looked at a number of twentieth-century communities that were planned specifically for families, and I found many physical similarities to these summer places. Radburn, New Jersey, founded in 1929 as “a town for the motor age,” was designed around long central lawns, with homes, a school, and a shopping area all arrayed around the green space, connected by grass and narrow paths. Cars were kept in the back—no façade-hogging garages here—treated as service vehicles and not as important guests. At Lafayette Park, in Detroit, each Mies van der Rohe-designed town house has at most a tiny strip of private lawn, wide enough for a grill and a couple of chairs—the rest of the backyard is communal. In a development of courtyard housing built in Vancouver in the nineteen-seventies, front porches are transformed into a terrace wrapping around a multistory, multi-family building. If parents were to come outside at the end of the day, they could easily socialize on these modified stoops while their children played.
In denser environments, play streets—which are closed to traffic and open to ball games, hydrant spray, and lawn chairs—can provide an asphalt version of those spatial connections. The practice of situating community facilities adjacent to parks, or opening schoolyards for play on weekends, helps connect public activity more readily to family routines. In ways large and small, planners should be thinking about vacation places not as separate worlds but as instructive templates. It’s always hard to come back from vacation, but we don’t need to leave all the good things about summer spaces behind.
Sourse: newyorker.com
