“Streets and their sidewalks, the main public places of a city, are its most vital organs,” wrote Jane Jacobs, the architecture critic and urban theorist, in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.”
The streets of our cities don’t just take us from one place to another; they’re where we shop, where we play, where we loiter and where we meet as we work to bring this pandemic to an end.
Even as our public interactions are limited by social distancing, our sidewalks remain the essential stage of public life. Times Opinion this spring asked photographers in Atlanta, Detroit, St. Louis, San Antonio and Washington to shoot the sidewalks around their communities. (They took the photographs before the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing racial justice protests that further underscored the vitality of our streets and sidewalks.)
These photographs show us the landscape of the current crisis, but also, still, the landscape of American life today. In these pictures, we see both home and homelessness, hope and fear, abundant resources and those desperate to find them.
Our streets divide our neighborhoods, and neighborhoods in America have always been divided by wealth, race and class. Yet sidewalks, too, connect — a single surface supporting every moment of our shared life in the city. Sidewalks belong to no one; that is another way of saying they belong to all of us.
Atlanta
Johnathon Kelso
Photographed on May 15, 2020
I thought it would be difficult to notice socioeconomic inequalities and issues of race and white supremacy in Atlanta by simply looking at sidewalk space, but it wasn’t. Whether it was a lack of sidewalks in communities of color on the South Side or an abundance of well-maintained walking paths in affluent white neighborhoods to the north, it became clear to me that these public spaces exhibit something deeper about how we view ourselves and our abject failure to follow the Golden Rule of treating others as ourselves. From Ralph David Abernathy Freeway to Peachtree Street, our public rights-of-way exude an indifference to equality that remains embedded deep beneath our feet.
Detroit
Brittany Greeson
Photographed on May 15, 2020
Detroit is complicated. It is vibrancy, light, hope and tenacity, evoked by those who have lived here, who have been here. It’s the embodiment of the American dream just as it is also the curtain pulled back, exposing the ways that dream has not been realized.
San Antonio
Christopher Lee
Photographed on May 15, 2020
Growing up in an immigrant household — split between two cultures — for me, home has always been fluid. But no matter where I end up, Texas has always felt like a home base. It’s almost been a year since I moved back to San Antonio after years away hoping to photograph more stories around the issues and ideas I grew up with: immigration, identity and cultures. Unfortunately I’ve spent very little time in Texas because of my work. When the pandemic hit, I decided to stay put in San Antonio and search for those stories I came looking for last year. While the concept of home still remains fluid, I’ve come to a deeper understanding of where I grew up and how I fit into that space.
St. Louis
Whitney Curtis
Photographed on May 15, 2020
Along sidewalks in parts of St. Louis iron gates secure private streets lined by palatial historic homes. A few blocks away, cracks begin to appear in the sidewalk as the grocery stores, elite schools, safe housing and accessible health care found around the gated neighborhoods disappear.
As I traveled around this city I’ve called home for 13 years, I still found these symbolic dividing lines, but I also found something in between — a brass band performing in the street for quarantined neighbors, volunteers assisting people without housing amid the pandemic, women creating a community garden on what was once an abandoned lot and lovers enjoying a moment together at a downtown park. Even if the divisive cracks will never permanently heal, I hope that something new can bloom from their crevices and that the gates will eventually open.
Washington, D.C.
Alyssa Schukar
Photographed on May 15, 2020
The two Washington, D.C., neighborhoods I photographed — around Cleveland Park and Anacostia — represent opposite ends of the city economically and geographically. But similar scenes played out in both communities as people amid the pandemic found a new appreciation for the sidewalk or patch of grass outside their front doors. City life offered entertainment away from television and phone screens. Children raced down empty streets. A man played basketball with his nephew. A woman launched a food drive in a church parking lot. Even mowing the lawn became an excuse to wave hello to a neighbor. These small moments are an unexpected blessing of our new normal: Our shared public spaces are once again filled with life.