The men who have done most of the work are those who enjoy
those sidewalks less. Only sidewalks. And I say for myself, the moment I get on
one of those sidewalks, I start to fall down.
— Emiliano Zapata, December 1914
City streets, like
city parks, were public spaces. Anyone could use them provided they did not
unduly annoy or endanger others. Under this construction of the city street,
even children at play could be legitimate street users. Some proposed a more
radical social reconstruction of the street as a motor thoroughfare, confining
pedestrians to crossings and sidewalks.
With these
perspectives went diverging answers to the question “who belongs in the
street?” To protect pedestrians, some proposed restricting their use of street
space. Pedestrians angry at the automobile’s intrusion resented such ideas, and
demanded restriction of the car instead. As disputes grew hotter, automotive
interests began to appreciate their own stake in the result. They lost
confidence that safety councils could prevent accidents without curtailing the
car’s urban future. By late 1923, therefore, motordom joined the safety fight
as an independent player. It struggled to stop definitions of the safety
problem that threatened the automobile’s place in the city.
. . .
Motorists hit upon
the most effective epithet early: “jaywalker.” A “jay” was a hayseed, out of
place in the city; a jaywalker was someone who did not know how to walk in a
city. Originally the term applied as much or more to pedestrians who obstructed
the path of other pedestrians—by failing, for example, to keep to the right on
the sidewalk. As autos grew common on city streets, jaywalkers were more often
pedestrians oblivious to the danger of city motor traffic. According to one
early, more general definition (1913), jaywalkers were “men so accustomed to cutting across fields
and village lots that they zigzag across city streets, scorning to keep to the
crossings, ignoring their own safety” and “impeding traffic.” Advocates of
pedestrian control fought to classify as jaywalker any person who walked
anywhere in the roadway, except in intersections at right angles to traffic. To
work, the epithet “jaywalker” had to be introduced to the millions. In 1921 a collector of dialect found the
term “not common.” That would have to change. In city safety campaigns, safety
reformers found their opportunity. In Syracuse’s pioneering safety campaign of
December 1913, a man in a Santa Claus suit used a megaphone to denounce
careless pedestrians as “jay walkers.”
. . .
Boy Scouts in
Providence, Rhode Island, summoned jaywalkers to a “school for careless
pedestrians” for reeducation. In many cities, police or Boy Scouts distributed
anti-jaywalking cards to pedestrians who crossed streets in disapproved ways.
. . .
In 1920, when the
wave of public safety campaigns was just beginning, “jaywalker” was a rare and
controversial term. Safety weeks, more than anything else, introduced the word
to the millions. Frequent use wore down its sharp edge, and it passed into
acceptable usage as a term for lawless pedestrians who would not concede their
old rights to the street, even in the dawning motor age. In 1924, soon after
the intense publicity of safety weeks, “jaywalker” first appeared in a standard
American dictionary. The entry officially gave the word its new, motor age
definition: “One who crosses a street without observing the traffic regulations
for pedestrians.”
— Peter D Norton Fighting
Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City
The Central Actor
The city is inhabited
by people, therefore it should be for them that the city is conceived, built,
and modified. At the same time, there are distinct groups of people and
specific needs. This diversity must be at the axis of transformations of urban
space.
Oaxaca’s
Casa de la Ciudad isn’t asking a lot. Their mission
is pretty straightforward, as “a center dedicated to the study and analysis of
the city,” and, in particular, defending “the development of a city that is
humane and safe, economically just and environmentally healthy.” Here’s a bit
of the permanent installation.
Unlike average tourists—who, as soon as they
arrive in a city, begin hanging awkwardly around the alien city center—I make
it my policy to head straight for the suburbs so as to learn my way around the
outskirts. I soon discovered the rightness of this principle. Never had the
first hour been as profitable as the one I spent in and among the inner port
and dock installations, the warehouses, the poorer neighborhoods, the scattered
refuges of the destitute.
Belt that cinches against the city and the
country, these outlying districts constitute their pathological side; they are
the terrain upon which the great decisive battles between town and country are
continuously being fought out. It is the hand-to-hand combat of telegraph poles
with agaves, barbed wire with prickly palms, the stench of steamed-up corridors
with the damp sycamore lined, brooding squares, shortwinded flights of steps
with overbearing hills.
— Walter Benjamin
Fotopiso: Historic
Maps of Oaxaca City.
Burned out as I thoroughly am on comic book superhero movies, I have to
allow that a name like the Pedestrian League invites at least a one season Netflix series,
or something on Cartoon Network.
related:
pedestrian days,
walking in the city,
Chinatown haiku,
Tracks
