The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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bell hooks
Whenever I traveled to cities, I saw them as lonely places. I could
not imagine life in the tall, dark apartment buildings. To me the city was a
bleak place—a wilderness of concrete, high-rises, and bits of green earth
here and there but not enough to let a body feel at home. The lack of visible
cemeteries made the city seem all the more a place of absences and vacancies.
My first visits to New York City were always to do business. I came
to give lectures. Absolutely nothing about the city charmed me. It seemed
always to be a lonely place and leaving it I felt as though I was recovering
some lost part of myself. In my late thirties, I moved to a small town, much
smaller than the town I had been raised in. The population was below ten
thousand—and it had that sleeptime feeling—a sense of languidness. It was
easy for me to make a home there. My two-story wood frame “shack” with its
seemingly endless small rooms, which appear to have been added as a mere
afterthought, was the place I had always dreamed about. When decorating
my house I chose the theme “soledad hermosa.” It was my desert place, a place
I could come for rest and sanctuary. Sheltered from neighbors and the street,
it became a place for me to think and write, to renew my spirits.
Like all deserts, it was also at times a lonely place. And so I began
to leave it to run off to the city and find spaces of connection and pleasure.
It began when the artist Julie Ault came to give a lecture in our small town.
We walked to the cemetery here and she insisted that there was life in the
city and culture I should be involved in and know about. Naturally, I explained
to her my theory that the city was really a great wilderness. Still she
lured me there.
The connections I made with artists and writers in New York City
seduced me—not the place but the people. When asked to consider coming
to teach at City College in Harlem, I agreed. Initially, I sublet flats in
Chelsea and the West Village. It was difficult for me to come to terms with
living in large buildings with strangers. Practically all my life, I have lived
in a world where everyone knows everyone else by name and on sight. The
city made me feel lonely inside. It made me feel like a stranger.
More than any other place I have lived in, it has changed my relationship
to space, compelling me to think about the connection between
class status and home making. Since leaving my hometown it is the one
place where a fierce system of racial apartheid seriously informs the conditions
and locations in which individuals live.
Even though I work way uptown, I chose to live in the West Village.
Initially, I did not think much about the issue of race. My choice was
merely informed by the desire to be in a less densely populated area—one
that was more neighborly, more like a small town. Buildings were smaller
in the West Village and it was an easy location to catch the 1 or the 9 train