The Problems of City Life, Chap. XV
H.L. Mencken, as you may already know, was an author and syndicated columnist of the mid-20th century from Baltimore. Once he hit the big time, he spent his workweeks in New York City, but commuted back for the weekends in Baltimore.
Given shows like "The Wire", this may be hard to believe, but Mencken was intensely proud of Baltimore and forever comparing New York unfavorably to it. He once mocked rich New Yorkers whose apartments overlooked "the blowing papers and anemic grasses" of Central Park.
This line always amused me, but I'd figured it was just hyperbole. I now know better.
Trash is constantly blowing down our street and onto our front walk and "patio" (for lack of a better word). I'm a neat freak by nature, so I usually pick this stuff up. But something I've discovered is that if I just leave the trash I see in the morning where it is, it'll be gone by the evening -- though possibly replaced with different trash. These "blowing papers" must exist in Manhattan, too, but I never noticed them there, because I was never the caretaker of a stretch of sidewalk there.
What's more annoying than the trash, actually, are the dead brown leaves from a handful of trees on our block that are either dead, or just have a lot of dead branches that are only slowly shedding their leaves over time. The leaves infiltrate our "patio" more pervasively than the trash does, and collect in piles everywhere, and then drift inside when we open our ground-floor door. I begin to see why East Asians build their houses to have most of the flooring higher than that which surrounds the entryway.
It's stuff like an endless gale of candy bar wrappers, receipts, and yes, even a parking ticket once, that makes it clear that Jersey City is not the country, or even the suburbs. But you know what? We can hear birds singing in the mornings, and the streets are perfectly quiet at night, so the J.C. has a certain pastoral quality to it, in comparison with Manhattan, at least...
Given shows like "The Wire", this may be hard to believe, but Mencken was intensely proud of Baltimore and forever comparing New York unfavorably to it. He once mocked rich New Yorkers whose apartments overlooked "the blowing papers and anemic grasses" of Central Park.
This line always amused me, but I'd figured it was just hyperbole. I now know better.
Trash is constantly blowing down our street and onto our front walk and "patio" (for lack of a better word). I'm a neat freak by nature, so I usually pick this stuff up. But something I've discovered is that if I just leave the trash I see in the morning where it is, it'll be gone by the evening -- though possibly replaced with different trash. These "blowing papers" must exist in Manhattan, too, but I never noticed them there, because I was never the caretaker of a stretch of sidewalk there.
What's more annoying than the trash, actually, are the dead brown leaves from a handful of trees on our block that are either dead, or just have a lot of dead branches that are only slowly shedding their leaves over time. The leaves infiltrate our "patio" more pervasively than the trash does, and collect in piles everywhere, and then drift inside when we open our ground-floor door. I begin to see why East Asians build their houses to have most of the flooring higher than that which surrounds the entryway.
It's stuff like an endless gale of candy bar wrappers, receipts, and yes, even a parking ticket once, that makes it clear that Jersey City is not the country, or even the suburbs. But you know what? We can hear birds singing in the mornings, and the streets are perfectly quiet at night, so the J.C. has a certain pastoral quality to it, in comparison with Manhattan, at least...