From the carrel where I’m working, I can lean back and catch a glimpse of New York City. MSU is perched on a ridge facing east, the very last vestige of the foothills of the Alleghenies before they descend to the coast. From the second floor, then, I can see over a small administration building, between two broad trees, across the swamp euphemistically called the Meadowlands, and into a smog that obscures but does not entirely conceal the Manhattan skyline.
I forget how close we really are to the bright lights and big city. I grew up on the very western edge of Chicagoland, and suburban sprawl has a lot more room to sprawl out in the Midwest. Here in Montclair, NJ, the houses are packed a little tighter, but not that much tighter. From any given point, it’s easy to imagine this is essentially the suburbia I grew up in. But that isn’t true: while the houses look much the same, the towns are crowded in nose to elbow, with no space between one town’s residential zone and the next, no space between residential and commercial districts, and no appreciable greenery outside the parks—no lawns, no grassy highway shoulders, no concessions to the water table.
It’s the kind of thing you can overlook until you’re reminded of it. Even Philadelphia, nearly as old as New York City, has green patches on the fringes, and stretches of horizon that don’t consist of human constructions. When we met my folks there, we lunched one day in a botanical garden that looked more like a forest preserve, which felt expansive coming so shortly after a dawning awareness that the park where we take our morning exercise seemed refreshingly green.
When a one-block park can do that, I’m probably not getting enough plant life in my own.
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