It’s Not About the Dogs

It’s Not About the Dogs.

David B. Schwartz

Is the Commons a public pedestrian street or a shopping mall?


Internationally-known Ithaca banjo genius Richie Stearns holds the record to this day for being thrown off the Commons. Just a few years after I watched the concrete dry on the first Commons there was Richie and his barefoot scruffy band of kids fiddling away. They became the Tompkins County Horseflies, grew up to be the legendary Horseflies, and a long list of incarnations of Richie and other great Ithaca musicians. I reached Richie on tour with “Richie and Rosie” in England to confirm my own memories. “It’s true,” he confirmed. “We’d set up, start playing, and in a while we would be thrown off.” Philosophical after all of these years, he wonders at the enduring effect of not only finding his first audiences on the Commons, but being driven off so much. “I think it bred persistence in me,” he says now. It’s an essential quality for old-time musicians.

Just saying no to things that people want to do on the Commons seems to ironically have started in right in the center of a town in which tolerance is practically a religion. On the Commons, however, we are intolerant. We have prohibited dogs to the point of ridiculousness that the beloved Riley, the golden retriever at the outdoor store with his own facebook page, got a $25 ticket for walking over to Lou the hot-dog man to get his daily grilled chicken from him. (Don’t ask him for chicken: humans only get hot dogs.) 

Lou himself has to leave his customary spot during festivals unless he pays the high fees marketed to out-of-town businesses. There have been campaigns over the years against smoking, against congregations of neglected teenagers, against riding your bicycle, against performances lacking permits, against anything not managed and controlled. After all, if you don’t manage and control people in a public space, just what might they get up to?

We seem to have a habit of treating the Commons not as a pedestrian public street, but as a shopping mall. Nobody is surprised that the Ithaca Mall prohibits a lot of things. They own it, and it’s solely for commerce.

What if the Commons is, on the other hand, a commons? On a commons, people are likely to do all sorts of interesting and creative things. As the great urbanologist Jane Jacobs pointed out, communities flourish in the free space of the street, and perish under regulation and inhospitable conditions. While dogs are prohibited, what is notprohibited? Obstructive barriers, open construction and cranes, construction noise, dust and debris are allowed on the Commons on a continual basis. And all of this is in service of turning the Commons into the kind of concrete canyon that Dryden Road in Collegetown has become.

Our twin pedestrian mall in Burlington, Vt is often cited in comparison with ours. Theirs flourishes. Maybe it is no accident that the shopkeepers set out waterbowls for dogs there. Maybe it is not by chance that the storefronts remain a human-scale three-story height. At the North end of their Commons there is a big, inviting, ankle-deep fountain. Instead of the Stay Out signs we put up, their sign says is different:

This is a lovely place to think,

But not a place to get a drink.

It’s great for making dreamy wishes,

But not for swimming like the fishes.

Go on - dunk a wriggling toe or two

(But not a head-full of shampoo)

And if you feel the urge to spout,

Make sure it’s poetry coming out.

Have fun, kids! 

A couple of years ago when Ithaca was in such deep freeze that the tourist bureau redirected people to Key West, we were there. If you’ve visited Key West, you know about the little Key West Chickens, who wander freely and peck sandwich crumbs from around your feet. They are picturesque to the tourists, and a pestilence to the locals. Maybe we should ask Key West to return our referral favor and send us a flock of their chickens. They’ll be so happy to get rid of them they’ll probably pay postage. We can set them loose now that the weather has warmed up. This will accomplish something that otherwise probably can’t be done: I will never hear about dogs on the Commons again.
 

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