The Deleted Scenes - NIMBY All Along?
Several times in pieces here at this newsletter, I’ve used a little quote from Rebecca Solnit’s 2000 book Wanderlust: A History of Walking:
I believe I first came across that incisive phrase, “invisible crop of memories,” in a piece on walking and sense of place by Grace Olmstead, a great writer in a similar-ish space to mine who I highly recommend. Check out her Substack here. Olmstead wrote, back in 2018, of her grandfather’s lifelong habit of taking long walks around his neighborhood in Moscow, Idaho:
It’s a beautiful piece, and ever since I read it, I’ve remembered that little phrase. It distilled the feeling I’d always had about ordinary things, how time hallows them, and why losing them can trigger a genuine sense of loss. I think about, for example, the giant, oversized Adirondack chairs outside a garden center on the way into my hometown of Flemington, New Jersey, onto which a few friends and I climbed up and took selfies in high school. Or the Pizza Hut where we used to pile up 30 or 40 plates at the lunch buffet. Or the first motel my wife and I ever stayed at together. Here are those chairs, by the way: I wrote a long, personal essay here last year, after a visit back to Flemington, which included a detour to my best friend’s house. Here’s an excerpt, where I use that quote again, which captures so well the feelings I had on that trip:
When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back.
I went on to argue that this is not, exactly, NIMBYism, and that in order for a place to grow and mature, it also needs a sense of place. I see change and continuity as things that go together and need each other, especially in a context like this: a small town that is never going to “Manhattanize” or become “unrecognizable,” and whose problem is more that nothing is allowed to change. All of this is a very long way to introduce an unfortunate fact I recently learned: namely, that Rebecca Solnit, whose 22-year-old line distilled a lot of my thinking about place, is in fact a standard-issue San Francisco NIMBY. She was interviewed in this piece for The Nation, following the Chesa Boudin recall in San Francisco. It features this unfortunate bit:
I guess The Nation is so far left that they don’t even have to characterize any of this as right-wing; even centrist is a dirty word! What Solnit says here is typical “left-NIMBY” stuff, and it’s not the only place she’s said stuff like this. It’s disappointing, because it makes me wonder if 1) the beautiful sentiment in Wanderlust is a sort of post hoc glorification of places never changing that I fell for, or 2) if it really is difficult-to-impossible to be in favor of growth and also have a genuine attachment to and appreciation of what already exists. Come to think of it, I suppose I would be sad if those oversized chairs were taken away, and if that garden center on the edge of town became a cookie-cutter subdivision. Am I just a NIMBY? What I try to do here is find the balance between the twin errors of encasing everything in amber, and treating everything that already exists as a blank slate for the new and improved future. I had assumed, based on that single line, that Solnit was someone who had balanced these poles, but apparently not. (Here’s a response from someone in the San Francisco tech industry to one of Solnit’s critical pieces. Both are worth a read if all of this interests you.) Well, what do you think? How do you actually balance these opposite impulses? Is it silly, or deeply human, or both, to mourn, say, an old sign or a couple of fake chairs along a highway? Does the fact that ordinary bits and pieces of the built landscape take on real meaning say anything about what we should build? How do you grow and enhance places so that they come to feel, as writer Josh Delk once perfectly put it, “more like themselves”? Take it away—and have a happy Independence Day! Thank you, really, for signing up and reading along. Many of you have just recently signed up, and this piece touches on themes I’ve written about heavily, so I’ve included extra related reading links today. Check them out! Related Reading: NIMBYism, Cassette Tapes, Nostalgia, and the Future A Piece of New Jersey We’ll Never Build Again Thanks for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekend subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive of over 300 posts and growing—more than one full year! And you’ll help ensure more material like this! You’re a free subscriber to The Deleted Scenes. For the full experience, become a paid subscriber. |
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