Reading the Streets

As the weather warms up, I’ve been taking more walks. I listen for birds, spy on chipmunks, and watch for wildflowers, even the resolute weeds that emerge from the cracks of the sidewalks. Back at the library, I might look up a curiosity in one of our many field guides. But what about the sidewalk itself? I wonder most about animals and plants, but I wonder too about all the human stuff: the drainage grates, the names of streets, the sanitation workers collecting recycling. The library also has field guides to these things.

As an example, I picked a house, typical of this area, that I often pass on my lunch break walks. What can I learn about this house? Using property tax records, I learned that it was built in 1969. Then I turned to our copy of A Field Guide to American Houses: The Defining Guide to Identifying ad Understanding America’s Domestic Architecture by Virginia Savage McAlester. This is a large and delightful guide, with lots of example photos and diagrams of architectural elements like windows and gables. The house in question is a two-story colonial revival with a built-in garage. “Colonial Revival” here “refers to the entire rebirth of interest in the early English and Dutch houses of the Atlantic seaboard,” explains the guide (page 414). The pictorial key at the beginning is especially useful: readers can easily spot the shape of a house or columns and then be prompted to look up likely styles. If you’re familiar with Peterson’s bird guides, this will feel familiar.

I’m also curious about the streets and roads themselves. It’s no wonder how “North Post Road” got its name, but what about Clarksville? Was there a Clark and when? Benjamin Clarke (the e got dropped in subsequent centuries) purchased 1,200 acres of land in 1696: those acres included some of present-day West Windsor, as well as the future locations of Updike Farmstead, the Institute for Advanced Study and Institute Woods, and the Princeton Battlefield. I learned all that from West Windsor Then and Now: A New Perspective by Paul Ligeti. The book was produced by the Historical Society of West Windsor to celebrate the town’s 225^th anniversary. Local history books are a great resource for better understanding the places that we live, and all our branches have local history in our collections ­– for example, Ewing Township by Jo Ann Tesauro in the Images of America series. Street names might seem humdrum, but I love digging into the mundane and discovering whole worlds of information. Dierdre Mask’s The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power delves into the history of how streets got their names and how houses got their numbers. “Addresses arose out of a grand Enlightenment project to name and number the streets, but they are also a way for people to be identified and tracked by those in power. As Deirdre Mask explains, the practice of numbering houses was popularized in eighteenth-century Vienna by Maria Theresa, leader of the Hapsburg Empire, to tax her subjects and draft them into her military. In many parts of the world, your address can reveal your race and class, causing them to be a shorthand for snobbery or discrimination,” says the publishers description. Addresses can mean a lot.

On my walks, there is so much that I step over and trod upon without thinking, but sometimes I do notice and think: what is the story of this manhole? Who decides where to put sidewalk and where to skip it? Which streets get four-way stop signs? For questions like these, I might turn to another “field guide:” Engineering in Plain Sight: An Illustrated Field Guide to the Constructed Environment by Grady Hillhouse. With cutaway diagrams of pedestrian infrastructure, highway interchanges, railroad tracks, wind turbines, and more, Engineering in Plain Site explains things you might have always wondered about – or things that you see every single day without thinking at all.

If you want to think deeply about infrastructure beyond the field guide, check out How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World by engineering professor Deb Chachra. The book has chapters on global cooperation, the political and social contexts of infrastructure, infrastructure and climate, and the future of infrastructure. Books like this help us think deeply about the systems we rely on with little notice, including sanitation. Did you know that New York City’s sanitation department has an anthropologist-in-residence? Robin Nagle was imbedded in the department, and even drove the garbage trucks, writing Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City. Of course, West Windsor is not New York City, but learning about how sanitation works in America’s biggest city still sheds light on the labor and systems involved in disposing of all our trash and recycling.

Since I’m thinking about the houses around me, the sidewalk beneath my feet, and the trash being picked up, I’ll also think and wonder about what I’m doing: walking. Rebecca Solnit has a wonderful book called Wanderlust: A History of Walking. I had not previously thought of walking as having a history, but Solnit follows our changing relationship with walking and what meaning we have made of it over time. I also recommend Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. This is a combination of memoir and criticism, about Elkin’s experiences as a “flâneuse” with chapters about female artists and writers for who walking their cities was essential. Both these books will get you out walking and exploring.

- by Corina, West Windsor Branch