The Sociology of Neighborhoods: Topic 4

I’ve just moved into Greenwich Village—coming from living all my life in the suburbs and becoming acquainted to life in a beach town—and since living here I’ve noticed an interesting trend in isolation. E.B. White, in his essay “Here is New York,” refers to this form of distance as an “eighteen-inch margin” separating the relative us from them (695). All my life I’ve been intertwined into my surroundings: eating dinner with my neighbors, going to the town parade, getting free water ice from the same place that I’ve been going to since I was a little boy. These events haven’t changed, but what’s so spectacular is that now I don’t have to go to them. For example, there recently was a block-party celebrating the start of term, something my mother would have told me “to go to and make a good impression.” I thought about it, and I decided I didn’t need to attend, and that was that. I’ve found that living in the Village there’s a high level of anonymity. Robert E. Park discusses in The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior that there is a “decrease in stable relationships within neighborhoods […];” just because you live in the Village doesn’t mean you need to have friends in the Village (23). It’s a place that offers a spring-board to the rest of the city, a boat into the island of opportunity.