A place to make summer memories that reconnect us with our cities I grew up on a cul-de-sac in suburban St. Louis, in a subdivision that offered a handful of variations on the same Colonial Revival home. I remember circling the cul-de-sac on my red Schwinn, reading my neighbors? floorplans from the street. The living room of one house might be where the dining room was on the other, someone may have opted for a pair of columns over shutters to frame their first-floor windows, but no one?no one?on my street had anything resembling a front porch.
Our front door opened out into what was basically a glorified front step, a small cement slab centered on a slightly larger cement slab. But even if we?d had a real, actual porch, there wasn?t much reason to sit there. The view was always the same: an empty sidewalk, an empty street, the rumble of a garage door as a neighbor slid a car out of the driveway. Even spotting the presence of a resident in the front of a house was a rare occurrence, something that would only happen if you caught someone mid-stroll to the mailbox or while mowing the lawn. For the first 18 years of my existence, nearly all my outdoor sitting happened in private, in locations that were neatly obscured from the street. Lush pergolas, multi-level decks, screened-in patios?these mullets of suburban life were the fortresses we built around us to enjoy the warm weather in isolation.
Accordingly, most of my summertime social interactions took place around cha...