My air conditioner rarely kicks on. I keep it set at 78 degrees and run it just enough to keep humidity from messing up my books and papers. I live in a handsome old factory building behind three layers of old brick, and it's literally cool. High ceilings make the place feel big even though it's only about 800 square feet, which is the perfect size for bookish types who prefer to do their own housekeeping.
What little housekeeping I do usually involves a Chicasaw Broom from Little Rock Broom Works. Paul Greenberg bought it from Melvin Pickens, better known as the Broom Man. Pickens died June 18, 2017, at the age of 84. Many readers will remember him; for those who don't, he was a man who sold brooms in the Heights.
He was legally blind and could only make out shapes. He took the bus from downtown Little Rock. His western-most point was Shipley Do-Nuts on Cantrell, and from there he worked back inward: Ozark Smoke House, Satellite Cafe, Boulevard Bread Company, Cheers.
Pickens graduated from Henry Clay Yerger High School in Hope. The grandmother who raised him died the next day; people have been known to let go when they are finished worrying about somebody. Pickens came to Little Rock in 1951 and attended the Arkansas School for the Blind, where he met Dorothy May Cane. They married in 1957. He began selling brooms in the 1950s.
To quote Cheree Franco's 2013 profile: "In the mid-'50s, many blind students sold brooms. Pickens became the Broom Man primarily because he outlasted the others."
I think about Pickens every time I start to say something ugly about the high-rise housing project Cumberland Towers, because he lived there, which makes it kind of sacred. But both he and his caregiver, Carolyn Palmer, recognized its faults. He would sometimes slide into gossip about "low-lifes" at Cumberland Towers, and she helped him get out to keep selling brooms after he got too weak to ride the bus because "up there in the high rise ... there's a lot of death and that's kind of depressing." Work was a way to get out of the project and into the lively and diverse world of the Heights.
Segregation is about much more than race. One of the bitterest ironies of the 20th century (and the 19th) is that the Utopians who aimed to reject social hierarchy and noblesse oblige did so by withdrawal. They isolated themselves, part of the time or all of the time, among people like themselves. And the planners imposed isolation upon everyone else.
In healthy communities, everyone crosses paths with everyone else--in person, on the sidewalk, at the street corner. Hierarchy is a much better form of social organization than segregation by type.
Better to know people, on the ground, and to know who is who.
And when you know who is who, you get to know where you are, because as much as I write about old buildings and old cemeteries, living people do make places, and they make people. Jane Jacobs wrote that in her neighborhood (Hudson Street in Manhattan in the late 1950s), when her son ran out in the street and got a scolding from Mr. Lacey, the locksmith, and Mr. Lacey informed the child's father, the child got a lesson not only that it's foolish to run out in the street, but that Mr. Lacey the locksmith cared about him.
The lessons add up, thus do sidewalks incorporate children into society. Better than schools do, and far better than towers, suburbs, or parks and "recreational opportunities" do. Jane Jacobs spent a lot of time watching children, including her own, play on sidewalks in the city. In her day, social reformers fretted wildly over children growing up "in the street." Jacobs saw that "the street" was the site of something better, a fine education.
I had the pleasure of meeting one of Melvin Pickens' sons when he worked as a security guard at the Old State House Museum. Melvin and Dorothy Pickens raised all four of their sons in public housing. Jane Jacobs did not object to public funding for housing; she simply thought that landlords of old, decaying, privately owned buildings could provide better housing than the government could provide in projects modeled after Le Corbusier's Godforsaken vision of the "Radiant City," a tower in a park. (The park, nowadays, is most often a parking lot.)
There is nothing inherently wrong with publicly funded housing, just with the way we do it. Before Melvin Pickens went to Cumberland Towers (age-segregated), he lived in what Ms. Franco's article calls "the South End," south of Roosevelt Road. Because housing was lower to the ground, a community was able to help raise children. As Franco puts it in her story:
"Half a century ago, kids charged through yards and skirted adults, all of whom were at liberty to dole out 'whuppin's' as needed."
Franco quotes Pickens' son John, age 49 at the time: "It was everybody raised everybody."
Brooke Greenberg lives in Little Rock. Email: brooke@restorationmapping.com