Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Prompt #1 Entry

Where Have All the Sidewalks Gone?

Baldwin Borough is a suburb south of Pittsburgh that does not have sidewalks. I spent my formative years here and have wondered often why the town planners who developed the space decided to leave such common appendages from its streets. Perhaps the notion that everyone would one day be driving everywhere moved such a decision forward. Built in the mid-1950s, Baldwin would have been a quintessentially American idea – success lead to progress and progress lead to thinking about the future in different ways, in newer ways. It has never made sense to me.

Those formative years were between the ages of ten and eighteen. While having on-street parking became a pleasant convenience, my younger years seem to have been stagnated by the inability to go somewhere. I just never thought to walk anywhere because directional suggestion was lacking – as if kids should need suggestions for what to do on a summer day!

We rarely road bikes, too many of us had the new-fandangled Atari game systems in our gamerooms, and without sidewalks to lead us anywhere we did little to motivate ourselves. Sure, we had a few friends whose houses we visited often but hardly enough to amount to exercise. The lack of sidewalks likely resulted in many having no motivation at all, a sort of community-wide laziness. We kids of the 1980s settled for the neighbor’s pool and waited until mom or dad got home to take us anywhere.

Some of us got jobs at sixteen, a few even went off to college after buying our own cars. But for the most part we just kind of hung around our own houses, shot occasional hoops into an under-used basket and walked to the store only when the cool lure of Pepsi aspired us to reach above our coach potato personas.

The community swimming pool was so far removed from our homes that a school bus ran through the massive borough each summer morning to pick up kids who had a pool pass stitched into their name-brand swimsuits. No one wanted to be that nerd who actually bought a pass, so we hung out in the small wooded lots that divided the subdivisions, doing little. The library sits dead-center within the borough, equidistant from both sides of the map which show Baldwin to be shaped like two “C”s cuddling, one upside-down and backward hugging the other at its upper crest. The building of books was too far to reach on foot, but really, what kid thought to read in those summers?

The borough didn’t make me lazy, that is squarely upon my shoulders. I eventually learned to work hard motivated by necessity, not activity. I returned to the same neighborhood in 2001 to raise a family. Baldwin’s lack of sidewalks cannot be blamed for complacent youths who grew to carry massive debt, vote less than any generation before it, raise teen pregnancy statistics to all new levels, surge the popularity of binge drinking, pot consumption and tattoo sales, but you have to wonder what could have happened if someone had said no to the idea of an entire community without sidewalks.