scale

It is an American trait, I think, to ignore looking around at where we are. Are we always in such a hurry, or have we merely trained ourselves to ignore our landscapes?

Uncomfortable with our neighborhoods, we thrive in building entire neighborhoods on our cotton fields (in my youth) or the corn fields (here in Indiana), moving on to somewhere else when we have used up the old, its drabness and dowdiness no longer tolerable.

And the in-between places, we let go to hell, so to speak, a hell of mismash large box stores, strip malls and lots of parking lots. How drab a street of franchise businesses look when they are set next to each other alongside a six lane city street.

It's been said by somebody that the grand architecture of our cities are now designed to be admired from a car going 60 miles per hour or so on a freeway past them (think Houston).

The scale of buildings and streets in this country rarely fit into a scale that is manageable for the human eye or that is fit for our walking through and living within them. One of the great pleasures of living in a city like DC with its height restrictions and lack of freeways is that it is often experienced by walking through it.

Back in the 1960s, Lady Bird Johnson led a Keep America Beautiful movement that in some ways lost out to the more important then emerging environmental movement. In her memoir, you can read where she and several hundred Garden Club ladies planted thousands of daffodils alongside the parkways in the DC area. Those bulbs continue blooming each spring.