The View from Lazy Point

In The View from Lazy Point, Carl Safina has this to say about place identity:

Photo of Long-Tailed Duck by Wolfgang Wander

"The Sound reflects both the light of morning and the calls of the ducks. I cup my ears and hear the Long-tailed Ducks' ah—oh-da-leep. Their call means it's winter—and it means I'm home. When I'm on a different coast, Long-tailed Ducks often make me feel at home. Among the gifts of the sea is a wonderfully portable sense of place. Portable because one ocean washes all shores. Like these migrants themselves, my sense of home goes where they go." 

Home, trying not to be portable: 

This house at Lazy Point 

once sat on dry land

   Video of Long-tailed Ducks
in Wig Bay, United Kingdom,
an ocean away from Lazy Point.

Who/Where am I?

Harold M Proshansky, Abbe K Fabian, and Robert Kaminoff, “Place-identity: Physical World Socialization of the Self,” in Journal of Environmental Psychology 3, (1983): 57-83.

Proshansky, Fabian, and Kaminoff describe how identity forms, develops, and evolves not only in response to interpersonal and social experience, but is simultaneously affected by one’s experiences with objects, things—and most central to the article—environments. The significance of home, school, work are explored as well as the how seemingly disadvantageous physical environments can be redeemed through positive social experiences enacted within them. Life changes and environment are also considered. An array of references, dating back as far as 1890, are cited in this dense piece.

 Harold Proshansky

Photo: City University of New York

Opening Doors

Clare Cooper, “The House as a Symbol of the Self,” in Designing for Human Behavior: Architecture and the Behavioral Sciences, ed. Jon Lang Dowden, (Stroudsburg Pa: Hutchinson & Ross, Inc., 1974), 129-156.

Cooper writes about the universal human experience of self identification with one’s dwelling. Various demographics, cultures, and types of dwellings are examined with building interior, exterior, household objects, décor, etc., studied with one eye on the material thing and another on person/people living there. Observations are made regarding social status associated with various types of homes. Life stages such as birh, childhood, marriage, and pregnancy are considered. Special note is made that a house, like a person, has an interior and an exterior.
Photo of Clare Cooper Marcus from Orindabooks.com

Inside Out House by 

Takeshi Hosaka Architects. 

Go Out and Play!

Michael Chabon, “Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood,” The New York Review of Books, July 16, 2009

Chabon recalls his outdoor childhood adventures in Maryland and how they were inspired by the local historical events from an earlier time. He draws a connection between unstructured, unsupervised childhood exploration and the lifelong interest in reading tales of adventure. Chabon wonders if the contemporary approach to parenting that does not allow children to freely and independently explore, will prevent today’s children from having the experiences required to seek and appreciate adventure in literature. 

Los Angeles Times file photo

Shadow Cities

André Aciman, “Shadow Cities,” in Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity. Language and Loss, ed. Andre Aciman (New York: The New Press, 1999),15‑34.

Aciman considers how, for him, New York contains many cities and how one can stand in one spot in New York, look in different directions and be transported to other places and other times through memory, literature, and imagination. He writes about the experience of looking for one place in another, jumping from London to Paris and Rome, before ultimately revealing that the city he truly longs for is Alexandria. While his ideas are compelling and probably resonate for anyone who is living away from his/her birthplace, Aciman’s descriptions of the streets around Straus Park could use more concrete detail to more fully render them Parisian or Londonesque.

(Photo of Straus Park by Marnie Hall)(Photo of André Aciman, below, by Peter Foley)

Dream Houses

The first house my parents owned sat on 50 acres of land along the road between Stedman and Panama in Chautauqua County, New York. This is the road where my father had us harvest hundreds of burger patties that fell off of a meat truck. He gave us each a galvanized metal bucket and had us pick them up while he watched us from inside the house with binoculars. I was probably 5 or 6, and it seemed like another thing one was expected to do, like picking blueberries, tomatoes, or apples.

The burgers cooked up pretty well, once you picked off the bits of gravel and grit.

We had lots of grit in that house, with its coal furnace in the dirt floor cellar. The building sagged at the back end and had to be jacked up so that it would not collapse. The floors were so slanted we could let a matchbox car go at one end of a room and it would run downhill and hit the opposite wall. When my mother cleaned she threw sudsy water at one end and let it flow down the length of the painted floor.

Half of the upstairs was unfinished, serving as our attic. It was a storage place filled with stuff stacked, jumbled—and fascinating. I remember beehive trays with chunks of wax honeycomb still in them, along with the crank operated device used to extract the honey. There were home grown tobacco leaves hung to dry, old furniture, big glass carboys for making wine or root beer, an easel with paints, along with brushes and supplies for my mother’s decoupage trays.  This was the clutter of my parents’ myriad projects.

In the other half of the upstairs were our bedrooms. My brother and sister and I slept in one room, and our parents in another. I remember few of the dreams that I had in that house, but I do remember one where I walked into the attic and found a door that I had not noticed before. Behind the door was a spectacular, colorful playroom loaded with all kinds of toys.

Then I woke up. There was no room of toys. The slanted wooden house was the same and so were the barn, the chicken coop, the kennel, the pond, the pasture on the side of the hill, and the many acres of woods.

Jumping way forward…

My second year of college I moved into the Caroline Ladd Pratt House, a dorm that was once a mansion belonging to the Pratt family.  17 of us lived in the house. We were members of an experiment to restore the house. It was certainly down at the heels. Purportedly abandoned in the 60’s and used as a shooting gallery by druggie squators that burned the furniture in the fireplace.

Pratt house was a wonderful mess. My first year there I shared an enormous room with another student, a painter. We filled the room with plants, and found furniture. I still have a chair that I found on the street in Brooklyn while I lived at Pratt House.

I remember a dream that I had about that room. In the dream several friends were admiring the space and telling me how lucky I was. I agreed that it was very nice, but said that I wished there were even more space. One of the visitors pointed to a corner of the room and said “What about that?” I looked and saw a gap where the two walls should have come together. I walked over to it and pushed on one of the walls and it swung as if it were on giant hinges, opening out onto a vast garden that presumably had been there all the time. My sense was that this garden was now mine and I could walk freely between the interior and exterior space.

In my many years of apartment living in New York, I know I’ve had quite a few of these dreams where I discover additional space, or realize that I have a big house that I did not know I had. It always feels exhilarating and wonderful...

...then I wake up. 

To follow-up on "Dream Houses", the crooked house on burger road was demolished around 1972 to make way for an off-ramp as Route 17 was extended over Chautauqua Lake. While many people were upset about a bridge over the lake, 

I think my parents were happy to have New York State buy the house. 

This Google map image shows the former location of the house.