The Character of a Neighborhood and Neighborhood Characters

Neighborhoods are usually described spatially as specific geographic areas and functionally as an amalgamation of social networks. Looking at our neighborhood, the Marais, from a functional standpoint, it immediately sounds as if the major social networks that inhabit this geographic area are characters in a bad joke: “the Jews, the Gays, and the Chinese all walk into a neighborhood and…” What is instantly clear once you walk down and around the streets of the Marais is that these seemingly disparate social groups have coalesced to form one lively neighborhood. Add in architecture dating from 13^th Century, numerous art galleries, and a cornucopia of the small clothing boutiques of up-and-coming designers and you get one of the most unique neighborhoods in the world. This is the neighborhood Lisa and I will be calling home for the next year of our lives and while we have yet to make any acquaintances within the major social networks that give our borough its overall character, we have certainly come across some neighborhood characters that give it some flavor.

The neighborhood character with whom we have the most interaction is our building’s caretaker. Although I converse in broken French nearly every other day with this women, I am ashamed to confess I don’t know her name nor the name of her small dog that is always by her side. I do, however, know that she is a devout Catholic as she very ceremoniously gave Lisa and I tickets to hear one of her favorite priest speak at Notre Dame Cathedral during the Assumption ceremony a couple of days ago. I guess it makes sense that some priests are more popular that others but I never knew the kind of rock star status a Catholic religious figure besides the Pope could obtain until I saw the lines waiting to hear this guy’s sermon. The sheer size of the crowd convinced us that the spaces our tickets reserved should be given to people who actually wanted to see this priest rather than two Americans who thought it was a good opportunity to see the interior of the church without paying the admission fee. We settled that evening on hearing a Phish-like jam band regale a crowd in a park adjacent to Notre Dame.

The other little tidbit indicating the piety of our building’s caretaker is how strenuously she attempts to inform us almost every time we see her that we should close the outer wooden shutters of our window when we are changing. Our apartment is on the second floor and directly overlooks the street. The proximity of our apartment to the street and the building we face gives passersby and our new neighbors a more or less uninterrupted line-of-sight into our living space. It seems that on our first or second day in the apartment a neighbor caught sight of one of us changing clothes and promptly informed the caretaker. Ever since that day she has spoken or mimed her warning about the shutters whenever our paths cross. Last week she even cornered another resident who speaks English and got him to tell me that I should be mindful of the shutters and the potentiality of peeping Toms. Here I always thought that Europeans were much more relaxed about the naked human body and it was us puritanical Americans who were spooked by nudity. Needless to say Lisa and I embraced our Puritanism and started closing the shutters after her first warning.

The other neighborhood characters who I have come to appreciate are a homeless man that sits next to our favorite neighborhood bakery and an old woman who hangs out in the laundry mat down the street. These two characters would just be your normal run of the mill crazies if not for some distinguishing things about them. The homeless man, who has perhaps the cutest dog I’ve ever seen, never leaves his little plot of land next to the bakery. He’s there at six in the morning and at nine at night. I’ve never passed by that stretch of street and not seen him. The old lady’s distinction comes in the occasional and variegated loud whooping sounds that she makes. In between her monkey-like cries, she’s as silent as a statue. Because the intervals between whoops are long and uneven, however, it’s easy to forget she is there and your thoughts inevitably relax back to the task of doing laundry. The moment when you’ve forgotten all about her is the moment when she hits you with a loud and startling whoop. I’ve never once heard her utter an understandable word. Only the whoops and only when you’re least expecting them.

If it weren’t for characters like these, our urban neighborhoods would be as bland and dry as toast. They add a little flavor to our day and a little color to our streets. Of course too much crazy in your neighborhood and you start to yearn for the suburbs. But in the right amounts, the crazy characters you come across in the streets of your neighborhood help to form its overall character and any urbanite definitely has a story or two of their own favorite crazy character. I recall a few of my favorites from Washington. There was the guy in Georgetown who attached a child’s sand bucket to the end of a fishing pole and would cast his line out to a group of passersby hoping to wheel back some cash. Then there was the guy, also in Georgetown, who opened the face-plate at the base of a street lamp to get to the power supply and used it to power the small television that he watched while begging for change. My favorite of them all, however, was the homeless man in Dupont Circle who used bus shelters and park benches as workout equipment. Whenever I saw this guy, who incidentally wore an elegantly groomed women’s wig, he was working out his biceps by lifting a bench or doing pull-ups on a bus shelter. He was the most physically fit homeless man I’ve ever come across. While there are many differences between the United States and France, I am happy to report that colorful and crazy characters seem to be universal features in urban areas. And, in a strange way, the characters who I’ve encountered in our new neighborhood have helped to make me feel more at home.