Do you love your hometown? Is there something about it that everyone else just doesn't understand? Describe where you live, and a typical walk around your neighborhood.

-- Anonymous, November 05, 1999

Answers

no one but baltimoreans will EVER understand why, after having a new football team for 4 years, we're still so goddamn bitter towards the nfl, paul tagliabue, whoever. you should have seen the stink the city raised when the new cleveland team came to town. incredible. and of course, it's part of our charm. we're defensive about everything.

yesterday a friend asked me if i was going to be one of those people who, upon graduating, went straight home and settled down in baltimore again. nope, though i adore and am very proud of my hometown.

i live in a very white, very middle class suburb of baltimore. if you walked through my neighborhood, you'd see lots of OLD trees, especially along the main road through the neighborhood - it was once the driveway for the estate that sat on the property, and it's stayed that way - narrow and treelined. lots of kids, too. that's what we have the most of, kids and trees. and because it's primarily residential, not much else.

-- Anonymous, November 05, 1999

Yeah, Sacramento doesn't have a lot of really old trees -- the ones in this neighborhood are only about 90 years old, because the area was developed 92 years ago. Further downtown there are trees that are in the 150 year range, but not many of them. I think there may be some really old native oaks here and there, but they don't like disruption, so they mostly died out and were replaced by non-native elms and sycamores. The elms are dying from Dutch elm disease. I think they're mostly being replaced by gingkos and Chinese pistache trees, which are at least good for fall color.

Sacramento is super protective of its trees. We have more trees than any city in the world except Paris, or at least we did as of a few years ago. You can't remove a street tree on your property. A few years ago, when a diseased 100-year elm tree was slated for removal, the neighbors held a block party/wake for the tree. And if you tack a garage sale sign to an elm tree, someone will surely tear it down and give you a talking to.

Our electric company gives away free shade trees, too, to cut down on air conditioning demands. It works -- we have two big ash trees shading the whole back side of our house, and we only ran our air conditioner for maybe an hour or two a day on days when it got to be over 105.

The trees are the best thing about this city.

-- Anonymous, November 05, 1999

The hills in autumn. Multicolored with the changing leaves, a riot of color that sets Tennessee abalze.

We also get a good variety of weather---a little snow in the winter, a little hot in the summer, a little bit of everything, not too much of anything.

OTOH we have country music. But no place is perfect.

Al (from Nashville) of Nova Notes.

-- Anonymous, November 05, 1999

Well .. I don't really have a hometown since I've lived in so many places.

But I can pretty much split up the early part of my life into two places, two parts: childhood in Brussels and adolescence in Berwyn, PA.

What I loved about Brussels: Trees, trees and more trees. The trolleys. Walking down to the market in St. Job from our quiet cobblestoned street in Uccle.

Brussels is a somewhat odd city -- it's old and medieval in some parts, but also modern and bustling as the home of the EU, NATO and many other organizations. It is somewhat akin to Geneva in terms of its mix of nationalities and has a rather extensive network of American institutions to support the large contigent of diplomatic corps and military that reside there.

In fact, one of the things that I disliked about living there was the "American enclave" that had taken over the town of Waterloo just ouside of the city.

But I loved living there as a kid, being able to ride my bike down to the park, buying fries or waffles at the ubiquitous roadside stands and essentially being able to run just a little bit wild on the streets without having to worry about much other than the cars.

Berwyn is a town I'm beginning to appreciate more as I grow older and I gain more perspective on my teen years. The sale of our house has also had a role in that increased appreciation -- there's nothing quite like the feeling of losing your home, even when you're not really _losing_ it but deliberately passing it on to another family.

The area is still preppy, ritzy and conservative in outlook/values, but it's also gorgeous and has nifty nooks and crannies and services that make it a nice place to live -- if you can deal with the bourgeois mentality.

First of all there's the Farmer's Market. That alone makes living on the Main Line worthwhile. Open three days a week from 6am to 4pm, the Farmer's Market is a mecca of good food products. Everything there is good -- produce, coffee, spices, cold cuts, fish, meats -- I got spoiled being fed from such riches, grocery store food seems so horrible by comparison.

Then there's the SEPTA regional rail that links the suburbs to the city that makes getting into and out of Philadelphia a relative breeze. The trains aren't as snazzy as they could be, but the stations are all quaint and old fashioned, some have been restored, others are still dilapidated wrecks, but everywhere there's a sense of history.

In fact the entire area breathes history, since Philly is one of America's oldest big cities. So in a sense, you've got it all, an urban metropolis and all of the advantages of an urban area, the peace and quiet of the suburbs and enough eclectic little shops to keep things interesting.

Now if only the downtown area would revive a bit so that more companies would move back into town so less people have to drive to jobs in the 'burbs ...

Anyway, there are also lots and lots of trees and other flora and fauna around, including the very large Valley Forge park, site of many a nocturnal escapade among the teen crowd.

I have good memories as well as bad, and I do occasionally miss living in Berwyn. But I have no keen desire to go back whereas I do want to go back to Brussels.

Now I live in Northern Virginia, on the edges of DC -- in many ways I'm still forming my opinion of the area. Other than the killer summers this is a very nice area to live in -- not as overwhelming as New York but with plenty of cultural offerings nonetheless, DC is definitely an interesting place to live.

-- Anonymous, November 05, 1999

I live in Austin Texas, the perfect place for me.

I think our mix of techies, academics, political types, and rednecks is justa wonderful stew in which to live.

The town itself still hangs on to the college town feel it had when I first moved here in 1968, although we are growing by leaps and bounds. There is a lot of energy here.

It's as beautiful a place as an inland city can be.

We have as close to a market economy as one can find in the United States. It's easy to start a business here, which helps us maintain our very low unemployment rate (essentially zero at the moment).

We have a wacky liberal old hippie/young lawyer activist city council, but they receive strong adult supervison from the conservative State goverment and the surrounding convervative counties, so they are mostly good for amusement value.

We bitch about traffic, but really we're better off than a lot of places.

Housing has been getting expensive, but a single family home or nice apartment is still within reach of most employed folks.

Willie Nelson lives nearby, the University of Texas football team is playing well, and it has cooled off a bit.

Oh, I forgot to mention the weather. We have one winter every two or three years. It lasts 2 to 3 weeks and serves to control the insect popultation. We have bad floods only every 3 to 5 years. Most of the year it is either warm or hot. In August it REALLY hot. But we're Texans here, we don't melt in the sun.

-- Anonymous, November 05, 1999

I love, love, love my hometown: San Diego. I think of San Diego as a bunch of cool little neighborhoods (The beaches, Hillcrest, Uptown, etc.) interconnected to form a big city. I love the canyons and hills, the bouganvillea, Mt. Soledad, the sky at sunset.

I am lucky enough to live next to the largest urban park in the nation, Mission Trails Regional Park. The wrap-around view of the mountains from my window is outstanding. There are lots of trees here, too, and flowers and cats.

It is paradise.

-- Anonymous, November 05, 1999

I love SF, my home town for all my adult life. Certain things about the economics of it right now don't please me, but no place is perfect, and it's always been a supply and demand situation here (high demand for housing and a pretty finite supply).

I've been to Sacramento lots of time and the trees are quite nice in that part of town, but for me, the climate there is a killer. I would probably never visit at all, especially not in the summer or winter, except that I have an old friend who got stuck there after her marriage of one year fell apart, and we go up to see her sometimes (but she usually comes down here instead because she misses SF so much).

Anyway, there are tons of pix of SF on my site, if anyone wants to check them out - http://www.judywatt.com/archive.htm

-- Anonymous, November 05, 1999

What I like about Toronto -- really, the only thing I like about Toronto -- are the old residential streets of which, luckily for me and Toronto, there are many. Toronto was never a planned city, inasmuch as it was founded and run by pragmatic Scots Presbyterian merchants who could give a damn about the civic niceties. Attempts to create squares, boulevards and promenades came later, and seem half-hearted and ill-maintained. Parks for the most part are even more poorly planned, with the exception of High Park, our Olmstead-like version of Central Park or Prospect Park.

No, in Toronto, where private life rules, the residential street is king, and always has been. From a few stories up in any downtown skyscraper, the city seems like a forest cut through with the occasional road or tall building. Trees -- maple, oak, ash, beech, pine, spruce -- you name it, we've got it. And every street worth its salt in the downtown has a range of Victorian townhouses, Edwardian cottages, inter-war duplexes and post-war bungalows. On streets such as mine you can still see the traces of the corner stores that dotted every second corner -- service nodes for the surrounding square of three or more blocks. And it all grew up quite unplanned.

It's being destroyed, of course, but like New York skyscrapers, there's so MUCH of it that they could't begin to do any serious damage for many, many years. That's Toronto -- nasty, tight-lipped, and solitary. You got a problem with that?

-- Anonymous, November 05, 1999

Those pictures make me envious, Beth. I love love love tree lined streets like that, and though there are streets like that around here, ours doesn't look like that.

However, I like where we live, which is Campbell, CA, on the west side of the Silicon / Santa Clara Valley. The weather is perfect for me - hot - and our neighborhood is quiet. The immediate neighborhood is fairly bland, but I don't care. The valley has an interesting mix of people: Computer people from all over the world, which includes eccentric geeks. A big Hispanic population. A big East Indian population. Ordinary soccer moms and their families. Nouveau riche computer people. Slightly odd folks who live up in the hills, some of whom have been here for years. Retired agriculture people who used to be fruit growers and processors. We always say that someone should write a series of mysteries set in the Silicon Valley because you'd have such an interesting bunch of characters.

We have great restaurants of every kind, and some monthly flea markets, which are two necessities of life for me.

A walk through our neighborhood wouldn't be very thrilling because there are about 4 home plans. But it's fun to see how people have remodelled them and changed them over the years. You'd see lots of cats sitting in yards, too, and crows and squirrels.

-- Anonymous, November 05, 1999

Um... The park is nice, love those oak trees. And the street running by the park, which is so completely canopied that I think some sections haven't seen sun except in winter for years. Also, the residential areas that have been around long enough for trees to get taller than the houses are fairly pleasant.

I do prefer Sacramento, though. Or Davis. Sacramento has a lot of interesting little nooks that you can not even notice until you are wandering around aimlessly and stumble across them (especially in Old Sac). The trees are lovely. Davis has a great park, lots of interesting little stores, and you can walk around pretty easily (unless you live in one of the newer, outlying areas). Yes, the climate gets unpleasant, but I can grow lots of peppers and tomatoes in the summer heat.

-- Anonymous, November 05, 1999

my old home town : toronto, ontario what i love about it : the trees, especially in the fall; the subway, since i love to people watch, oh and the streetcars, especially the old ones; the lake - when i was younger we'd spend a lot of time at lakeshore feeding the seagulls; chinatown - it's HUGE and you can buy just about anything you can thing of, cheap; kensington market - has killer vintage shops, or at least it used to - they're all expensive and over run with suburban wannabies willing to pay $30 for used tshirts - but it still has wonderful veggie places and also seafood stores with shark hanging in the window and such; all the movie sets - they're always filming in toronto - the last time i was there i took my younger cousins to chinatown and some crew had taken over the sidewalk with a set straight out of the 1800's - chickens in wooden crates, hay all over the sidwalk, it was great; the little record stores; the little bookstores that have used paperbacks spilling off of the shelves and out the front door and you can tuck yourself a corner and disappear - there's tons of them; the old government buildings - there's a real sense of history there; the art gallery - it's incredible - houses the henry moore sculpture collection; the royal ontario museum - it has the most amazing asian pavillion; the "feel", the "atmosphere", the undercurrent there is comfortable and familiar to me. i'm going for a visit on the 26th and i can hardly wait. i'm going to walk around all of these places in a big warm coat and my nose will get all red and there will be multiculturalism galore - something that's really missing over here on the west coast.

my new hometown : seattle what i love about it : how when you're driving along and you turn down a little sidestreet and all of a sudden you are bumping across cobblestone; the insanely active music scene - there are *tons* of bands, and they play all the time, and they are also good people; the mountains - on clear days (which of course isn't often) the view is shockingly beautiful, especially when mt. rainier looms on the horizon - it's like a scenery orgasm or something; the neighbourhoods - every area in the city has it's own name, and each area is quite distinct and has real personality. i like to walk around capital hill, it's actually the only place i walk a lot. there are tons of little shops, nice trees along the street, a really diverse crowd- it's also the "gay" neighbourhood in seattle - so there are a lot of men pinching bums and giggling a lot - tres cute. my hairdresser is along here actually, in an older building. there's also a Dick's - which is the old drive-in burger place that sells cheeseburgers for like 99 cents and they're not bad really. ummm, lots of little noodle houses. oh and it has these HUGE old houses on the side streets. lots of craftsman bungalows too (droooolll, i'm so jealous by the way) and actually this guy i just started dating, his parents own this massive, very "english" type house. the interior is all dark wood and white plaster walls and victorian style furniture. wait, i guess saying english is bad since they're irish... okay let's say the interior is very "tudor". anyway. it's a very peaceful, pleasant area. i'm dying to move there, asap.

i think i wrote too much.

-- Anonymous, November 05, 1999

Pittsburgh isn't my hometown, but since it is where I currently reside, I will use it as such. When I first decided to move to Pittsburgh, I had never visited the city before and really had no idea what to expect. I certainly didn't expect it to be so nice! It is a surprisingly beautiful city and very underrated by people who have never been here--a common reaction is: "Pittsburgh? You live there? Ew, isn't it dirty and smoggy, a boring old industrial city?" But it isn't covered in stink and black anymore--it is a city of hills and bridges and big parks smack dab in the middle of everything. I love driving over a big bridge and looking out over one of the rivers or some railroad tracks and seeing the houses lined up on the hills. I don't walk around my neighborhood much, but I do run every morning. I live in a neighborhood full of old brick houses and I love to check them out as I run by. I am sure people wonder why I am gawking at their houses, but I love the architecture! I like to watch the gardens grow in the springtime and then slowly disappear as the winter comes. I have favorite houses and yards and I always know which houses are for sale and how long it takes them to sell. I love it. The streest are lined with trees (not as many as Beth's neighborhood though!) and now that the leaves are yellow and orange and red, it is simply gorgeous in the early morning. I also like to run across the bridges in my neighborhood (Pittsburgh really is the city of bridges--there are hundreds of them!) and look across to the other bridges and the skylines of the other neighborhoods. I like to run around other neighborhoods too. I have seen more of this city on my runs than

-- Anonymous, November 06, 1999

Here I am in New York City. Everything at my fingertips. Wonderful walking city. Something new every day. Excitement hums in the sidewalks. Even though I'm the biggest loner geek outsider there is, I still feel like I'm in the center of something. I love this city.

And yet...

This isn't my hometown. How could it be? City of 8 million people. It's a frat party trying to get on the subway every morning.

My hometown: Franklin, Massachusetts. As unremarkable a town as exists within the sprawl of suburbia across our nation. But I love it unconditionally.

I've sat for 10 minutes and five false starts trying to find a way to communicate this love. The smell of the seasons, the bunches of stars (pretty star-starved here in Manhattan), the sounds from the highway, the lonely commuter train whistle, the old Main Street, historical facts (did you know that the town was named for Ben Franklin while he was still alive?)...

The library. More solid than stone, set way back on a corner lot just off of Main Street. A plaque calls it the "oldest circulating public library in America". Upstairs in the reading room a huge mural of nymphs and Greeks (some of the nymphs were topless, I didn't want to tell anyone for fear they'd paint it over). I would take out every science fiction book in the little one-half shelf section. Then all the mysteries, then the general fiction... won a contest there once for "most inventive excuse for a late book". There were more shelves upstairs - the stairs were tight wire structures, the floors were semi-opaque glass, there were lots of little alcoves to sit on the floor and read and not be bothered by anyone, anywhere.

I went back to the library a year or so ago. There's carpeting, and no more upstairs shelves or alcoves. Everything is well-supervised. There's been progress. Franklin's the same way. Every time I go back there's another building, another strip mall, three more housing developments, more parts that make it look like any other anonymous town with two exits off of the interstate.

But the nymphs are still there at the library. My friend's mom still runs the convenience store on West Central Street. And there's still lots of stars, and trains, and friends and family. I can't go back - not yet, anyway. There's too much of the rest of the world to see and touch and taste. But I dream of the day that I'll go back there for good, lie down in my back yard at night, and feel at home.

-- Anonymous, November 06, 1999