For those of you who did not grow up in or near a large urban area, stoop-sitting had nothing to do with crouching. Your stoop was the set of stairs – usually concrete – that led from your front door down to the sidewalk. There weren’t many of them – usually three or four steps was enough to bridge that gap – but they were all you needed to provide you with a place to sit and watch the world go by.
I come from a long line of stoop-sitters.
This photo was probably taken in the late 1920s, if I judge my grandfather’s age correctly. That’s him in the middle, hanging out with his boys down in South Philadelphia. They’re not really doing anything – maybe they’re waiting for the Sea Devils advertised in the broadsheet behind them, but I doubt it, since Sea anythings were rather uncommon on the streets of South Philly, unless you went to 9th Street and bought them fresh to eat for dinner.
This one is my great-grandmother – my grandmother’s mother – maybe a few years later and a few blocks over from the last photo. It’s probably the early 1930s now, and she’s out on her stoop, taking in the day.
Her sons were also practiced stoop-sitters. That’s John on the right – he would later go into the Army, and I’ve posted his service pictures before – and Joe on the left.
And you could always find Zaduck out on his bench as well, with a friend or two. He’s the one on the right, and it’s probably sometime in the 1940s.
The family has long moved out of the city and into the suburbs, where there are no stoops. The houses are bigger and nicer, and there’s less traffic and more space and green, but everything is oriented inward or toward the back of the house, away from the street and the people going by. When we stoop-sit these days, it’s an occasion.
Kim and I honeymooned in New Orleans, back before it was destroyed by the twin demons of hurricane weather and administrative incompetence. We spent a glorious week there, not doing much more than eating, drinking and taking it all in. There’s no open container law in New Orleans, so we got into the habit of going down to Bourbon Street to a little walk-up store with what appeared to be a row of Slurpee machines, except that they weren’t Slurpees – they were daiquiris. We’d get a 32-ounce daiquiri (we learned to split one, eventually) and sit on the nearest stoop and watch the people parade by.
It was a return to my roots.
5 comments:
My neighbors stoop-sit (or the suburban equivalent) all the time. I don't usually join them because I have nothing in common with them in most cases, and in a couple cases they're just dumber than a box of hammers.
In my neighborhood, there isn't much point to stoop-sitting because nobody in this gearhead town actually walks anywhere and there are only so many passing cars one can look at.
You need a rich pedestrian traffic for this to work.
And decent beverages, I think.
Janiece is on to something in addition to the vehicularization of traffic. We don't live in communities of people with similar backgrounds and ethnicities anymore. We're also not all held to a common set of topics by a lack of educational opportunity that makes everyone's problems common ones that can be jawed over ad infinitum. So stoop sitting holds less interest today.
What we've lost is the slower pace and the ability to think and reflect that that pace affords. On the positive side, stoop sitting was also the by-product of a small town mentality that kept each group firmly in their enclave in the city. People move about more now, and have more diversity of thought.
I would agree with you about the acceleration of everyday life that has gotten more and more intense over the last few decades. Part of the reason why nobody stoop-sits is simply that nobody has - or feels they have - time for it anymore.
There is also the fact that in general Americans' lives have turned inward. Our houses are bigger, but they're oriented toward the back yard rather than the street. Drive down any new housing subdivision today and what do you see facing you? Garages. It's inhospitable.
But to say that We don't live in communities of people with similar backgrounds and ethnicities anymore. We're also not all held to a common set of topics by a lack of educational opportunity that makes everyone's problems common ones that can be jawed over ad infinitum. is to miss one of the major developments in American society over the last half century.
We are in some ways far more divided into homogeneous enclaves now then we were when the pictures on this post were taken. We are separated by race in ways that were not true before. We are separated by economic class in ways that were not true before. We are separated by political views in ways that were not true before. There have been a number of studies done on this, each proposing its own mechanism for it, but the fact remains.
People were simply forced by circumstance to live close to each other. But we are more mobile now. Many of us can live where we choose and commute to where we need to be. We rarely have contact with differences the way we did a century ago, and those that do are the exception, not the rule.
Part of the reason Kim and I travel is so that Tabitha and Lauren don't confuse "familiar" with "normal" the way most Americans do.
I don't know how much that impacts stoop-sitting.
I've never seen a picture of my great-grandmother in her younger days or my great uncles in their younger days. What a treat - thanks David!
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