The best neighborhood in North America

A strong sense of neighborliness makes Jacobsburg a happy place to live and work. (Photo courtesy of Project for Public Spaces.)

It’s no coincidence that the words “commons” and “community” spring from the same linguistic ancestor—which some researchers trace back beyond Latin and Greek to “kommein,” a word that in Indo-European languages means “shared by all.”

Several years ago I wrote the Great Neighborhood Book (together with Project Public Spaces) to offer fresh ideas about how to increase conviviality in our lives and strengthen valuable social bonds with neighbors. Since then almost everyone I meet asks: What’s your favorite neighborhood?

To settle the matter once and for all, I wrote up a list of all the wonderful neighborhoods I’ve had the pleasure of visiting. Then, with great deliberation, I began to cross off names until only Jacobsburg remained. It is, in my opinion, the Great North American Neighborhood. To keep the suspense going, I will let you figure out the city where Jacobsburg is located. But here are the things I love about it.

A strong sense of neighborliness makes Jacobsburg a happy place to live and work

Jacobsburg grew up slowly in a variety of architectural styles between 1890, when streetcars first reached this wooded spot along the river, and 1920, when the boom in automobile sales opened up distant suburban tracts for development. Buses now ply streets where rails once ran, but the corner business districts that popped up to serve trolley riders are still the heart of the community. Butcher shops and haberdasheries, however, have now given way to ethnic eateries and vintage clothing shops.

One of the traits I most admire about Jacobsburg is a knack for being old-fashioned and cosmopolitan at the same time. At one of my favorite street corners in the world, 19th St. and Holly Avenue, a delicatessen run by an old guy named Dom looks out across the intersection at Krazy Kat Komics, a used and rare comic book store. Within a few steps you’ll come across a Reconstructionist synagogue, the largest fan belt dealer in the state, a Caribbean seafood restaurant once written up in Food + Wine magazine, and a laundromat made famous in an R&B song.

What I like about it

What do I like most about Jacobsburg? Well, I could mention plentiful trees shading the sidewalks or the pleasing sequence of three-and four-story buildings with front stoops where people sit out to socialize on warm evenings. Then there’s Riverwood park (which everyone says was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, but wasn’t) with a swan pond, skateboard ramps, a weekend farmers market, summer band concerts, and a café with better pastry than you’ll find in Copenhagen.

And how could I ignore the invincible spirit of neighborliness, apparent even to a casual visitor? Current residents explain that the neighborhood set aside its own ethnic tensions in the 1970s and came together to fight a freeway that would have essentially leveled the place. That sense of civic engagement endures to this day. The local business association sponsors an annual Spring Festival with a 30-foot maypole in the playground of St. Stanislaus School. Meanwhile a VFW Post, a commedia dell’arte theatre troupe, a Baptist congregation, a Mexican motorcycle club, and a gay men’s chorus are among the dozens of local organizations that collaborate to raise money every December for the neighborhood food shelf.

One last thing I want to mention about Jacobsburg is the wealth of great pubs, which live up to an older sense of the word—meaning “public house.” Families encompassing three generations can be found in the booths at corner taverns like Rufus & Bessie’s or The Lisbon Inn eating supper right alongside laborers celebrating quitting time and students commemorating the end of another day of classes. The great majority of these pubs share a virtue that English novelist George Orwell lauded as “quiet enough to talk,” in a 1946 essay about his favorite London pub, The Moon Under Water.

But The Moon Under the Water existed only in Orwell’s imagination, a composite of the qualities he found in great pubs across England. And the same is true of Jacobsburg, a neighborhood that I dreamed up out of wonderful experiences I’ve had on the streets of many cities. I named it after urbanist visionary Jane Jacobs. (The photo you see here is actually Chapel Street in New Haven, Connecticut—an urban success story all on its own, where 95 percent of the area’s buildings were vacant in the early 1980s.)

But rather than being uselessly Utopian, I see Jacobsburg as the future that’s possible for neighborhoods everywhere as people apply the spirit of the commons to make great communities.

This article was published in the new ebook: How to Design Our World for Happiness: The commons guide to placemaking, public space, and enjoying a convivial life by Jay Walljasper & On The Commons. Download at onthecommons.org