Consequential Strangers: Turning Everyday Encounters Into Life-Changing Moments by Melinda Blau & Karen L. Fingerman

Author:Melinda Blau & Karen L. Fingerman [Blau, Melinda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2009-07-27T22:00:00+00:00

5

Being Spaces

Some of the joys and blessings of being alive ought to be as easily achieved as a stroll down to the place on the corner—but there does have to be a place on the corner!

—Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place

The Power of Place

“I assumed everything would be easy,” said Karen Robinovitz, speaking of her move to New York City after college graduation.1 It was the mid-nineties. An aspiring fashionista, she had landed the requisite Devil Wears Prada job at Women’s Wear Daily, a plum her peers would die for. Robinovitz was no Ugly Betty. She had the looks—a memorable face framed by long, well-coiffed dirty blond hair—and she knew what shoes to wear, which restaurants were hot, and how to jostle to the front of the line. At night, she went home to a comfortable apartment on the well-tended Upper East Side. But for all these superficial trappings, she was miserable. College chums had moved to the back of her convoy, and one by one began disappearing from the rearview mirror as each chose a different highway toward adulthood.

“I knew people in Manhattan, but they didn’t have any resonance in my life. And I was coming from Emory [University] where I was a bigger fish in a small pond.” Now she was surrounded by piranhas. “Women in the fashion industry tend to be competitive; they put other women down. So I didn’t have a loose network of people around me. I just didn’t feel good about myself. I was a writer but didn’t feel motivated to write. And I had a string of bad boyfriends.” Depressed and disappointed that she hadn’t advanced beyond the reception desk, she truly hit bottom when she was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune condition. “One day I walked into work and, without any plans to do so, I just quit my job. I had no clue about how I was going to make money.”

Robinovitz moved downtown to the West Village, a neighborhood memorialized by urban activist Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The book had inspired a generation of architects and city planners to look at the human element when designing a neighborhood or city, not just its buildings. Jacobs described how the mom-and-pop stores, coffeehouses, three-story brownstones, and tree-lined blocks allowed for the “intricate sidewalk ballet” performed daily on her beloved Hudson Street.2 Some thirty years later when Rabinovitz arrived, the area had changed in some respects, attracting a more upscale, urbane crowd. But it was still an environment where neighbors bore witness to each other’s everyday rituals in a reassuring yet unintrusive way.

When Robinovitz walked the zigzagging blocks of the West Village, she felt what Jacobs famously called “eyes on the street.” People paid attention to one another. One of her favorite haunts was Shopshin’s, a diner/deli. Within a month she knew the owner, Kenny, and chatted with assorted other neighborhood characters throughout the day—people at the dry cleaner, nail salon, and “the little candy store on the corner.

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