When Kaid Benfield came to Baltimore to talk about his new book "
People Habitat" he started out reading a section from his introduction. There he introduces himself by telling about his growing up in Asheville N.C. and how it has formed his ideas on how a town or city should work. He liked to hang out "downtown" and watch people. Benfield writes:
"My hometown of Asheville, North Carolina had a smallish downtown, and instinctively that's where I wanted to be on a Saturday when I was growing up. Sometimes I would hop on the city bus, take myself down there, and hang out, with no set agenda. I loved the city library, the tiny downtown park, the main square, the Woolworth's, the movies, the music store. Especially the library and music store. Downtown, sleepy though it was, seemed like a place where things happened, where grownups more important than me did . . . what, exactly? That wasn't yet of interest."
I sat three or four rows away from Benfield who stood behind the podium of an old fashioned lecture room on the third floor of the magnificent Pratt library main building right across from Latrobe's Basilica of the Assumption in downtown Baltimore. I had missed the reception in the swankier Poe room. When Benfield spoke, I sat there hungry but still eager to meet the author of the many interesting articles which I have read in the daily Atlantic Cities postings. Kaid had a calm and unassuming way to talk. His childhood story about downtown Asheville immediately grabbed my attention.
For one thing, it reminded me of a realtor on one of my frequent hunts for another house to accommodate my growing family here in the US, who had told me that people always want to find the house that looks like their childhood home. Fat chance, I thought then, thinking of the cramped apartments in German two and three-family homes that had been my home for all of my life as a child. But now, with Benfield pronouncing how those days in Asheville indelibly had formed his perception how a city should be, the city places of my youth sprang to life, not the apartments. I recalled my own trips to downtown.
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It would have been a tram like this which
took my mom and me into "the city" |
As a child, I wouldn't hop on a bus like Benfield, I would ride my bike. Younger still, less than five years of age, my mother would take me by the hand and we would walk two blocks down Neuferstrasse in Stuttgart-Feuerbach to the streetcar stop. We would fetch a tram that would take us downtown Stuttgart, which at that time was still mostly a landscape of ruins. As an industrial center Stuttgart had been a frequent target of allied bombing raids. Nine or ten years after the war's end, planners had begun with their own destruction orgy.
But the place I can recall much better is
Heidenheim, a smallish industrial town in the Suebian highlands some 24 miles away from Ulm, Einstein's birthplace and also home of the world's tallest church steeple. Undamaged by the war but transformed by traffic planners. But I am jumping too far ahead.